Over the hill

As the days march unremittingly toward that two-decade signpost only a couple of months from now, my eerily creaking bones suggest that perhaps it's time for a change in outlook and mindset for what lies beyond the white fences of adolescence; some recent experiences I've had tell me that I need new perspectives for direction, and that the hills past that signpost go unpredictably up and down. What I've read about in books ostensibly exists in colours beyond those pages of black and white, and the culture of academia is often too quixotic for a world not satisfied with hypotheses and best-fit curves, that has little patience for lengthy arguments or esoteric trivia, and which seldom comes equipped with rounded corners, safety harnesses or security features.

Half-full is the same as half-empty, and vice versa; the important thing is finding water to fill up those glasses.

Four Quartets
Burnt Norton
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T.S. Eliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden...
________________

It's late and I have to go soon, but something's not packed: I know I haven't forgotten anything at all, on the contrary; I'm missing someone.

Perlman

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

-Victor Hugo

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Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.

- Bertrand Russell

when flowers gaze at you

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth
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Sometimes I lie down in my room, watching how old things lean in familiar ways—the stack of years built in birthday cards, the shelves of gifts sagging with sentiment, the different phases of faces mapped out in yearbooks, the faces of different phases caught in photo frames, greetings and farewells and apologies pressed between pages—and I think about the things that never had time to settle in, of relationships that never died but merely grew dormant, and feel the edges of the past curling in as the future unfurls itself.