Some have the gift to take mere words and turn them into images, vivid and alive. More like a memory, created in that moment that eye meets page, than something newly formed. They touch something in us, forgotten perhaps, but longed for still. We attach some part of ourselves to the words and they, in turn, become a part of us that we carry in our own minds. All the more potent when they are written with a heart full of shared longing.
"Soon as I had heard those injured souls I bowed my face, and held it down, until the Poet said to me, "What art thou thinking?" When I replied, I began, "Alas! how many sweet thoughts, how great desire, led these unto the woeful pass."
~Dante
Canto V
Words shared are their own form of intimacy.
Therein lies their power over us.
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
--William Wordsworth
I have been reading. Devouring. Writing.
Turning. Twisting. Inspired. Renewed. Remade.
The passion for words has fallen upon me.
The Art of War:
Did I mention that I love playing 'RISK'?
Something that we spend, not hours, but days playing.
I have met some great strategists and learned from the best.
Probably all of those years in military training.
I miss the challenge. I have met my match.
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war,
while defeated warriors go to war first
and then seek to win."
~Sun-tzu, The Art of War. Strategic Assessments
Mr. B - Sun-tzu would not approve of this.
I have a friend in Boston.
A professor of Literature.
We have been locked in a dead heat in our Scrabble competition.
The forum has once again fallen into shambles as she and I have become consumed with the competition.
*I don't have the Q*
Ha!
