Saturday: Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610

Tota Pulchra es, amica mea;
Favus distillans labia tua;
Mel et lac sub lingua tua;
Odor unguentorum tuorum
Super omnia aromata.

Ecce tu pulcheres, dilecte mi;
Ecce tu pulchra es, amica mea.

Iam enim hiems transiit;
Imber abiit et recessit:
Flores apparuerunt;
Vineae florentes odorem dederunt.
Surge, propera, formosa mea;
Surge, propera, dilecte mi;
Surge, propera, et veni:

Veni coronaberis.
(from the Song of Solomon)

...

Only you can prevent Kundera.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
-- Joyce from Dubliners (The Dead)

Read again in steam of tea and drafty kitchen telephone: D. counseling "the saddest person in the world" as happens when she calls, which is only when like this. Remembering that white phone unanswered, those days under covers, and finding empathy even mid-eyeroll. Kindness, compassion, a firm boundary.

cruel to be kind

"Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortase requiris
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior."

-- Catullus

Was-lost-but-now-I’m-found is the shade
of orange in the oaks today. Was-frost
but-now-I’m-wind is how they move.

      (Max Garland -- yes, I've said it before.)

I used to dread the in-betweens of seasons, spring especially. The melt and thaw of it all! Freeze and heat, unpredictability and uncertainty, the moods of weather and postman's harrumph. Still do dread the spring, come to think of it. But this, this November of warm and chill and stiff sunshine -- midway away, o frost, and carry on undulating into winter. Love it. Too much melodrama for November's taste, but too bad for it.

NB: Pliny the Tiny

productivity

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."

-- Oscar Wilde

(Was it you who told me Keats was a doctor?)

Hello, NS.

Ginmar's talk on military honesty hit all ten pressure points and I've walked four steps.

fiedanl