More than I can hold

As part of the country braces for the impact of another hurricane, and the people of Louisiana remain displaced as more water invades their homes (or what's left of them), I have the surreal feeling of living an untouched life. I look at internet ads for The Corpse Bride, which opens this weekend, and think, "wow, movies are opening this weekend, and yet there are thousands and thousands who cannot imagine going to a movie. And the biggest tragedy of my week has been the fact that the Sox have been knocked out of first in the AL East - but how much does this matter? The world has become so interconnected, and we now have access to so many more threads between ourselves and people all over the world. Yet we live in bubbles of selfish reality: 'what matters to me is what affects me most.' I'm not really offering a solution, just ruminating on the vastness of the human condition and the small part we all play in our own lives.


On a different note, one of the most important things to me is knowledge, and I celebrate the finding of knowledge, both the kind found through reading books and the kind experienced by putting a book down and walking outside my front door.

Excerpt from "Ode to the Book"
by Pablo Neruda

I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.

translated by Nathaniel Tarn