Different Drummer

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? 

. . .Walden by Henry David Thoreau 1854

Six Word Memoirs III

ABCs MTV SATs THC IRA NPR.

--- Jancee Dunn

From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Wounds and deficiencies

One should conceal one's wounds and hide the crippling deficiencies of life -- poverty, misfortune, sickness, ill-success.  People begin by being touched and moved to tenderness by their friends' distress; presently this changes to pity, which has something humiliating about it; then to a masterful giving of advice; and then to scorn. 

--Senac de Meilhan 

Quoted in "The Far Side of the World" by Patrick O'Brian

Distance and a Certain Light

Distance and a Certain Light
by May Swenson

Distance
and a certain light
makes anything artistic—
it doesn't matter what.

From an airplane, all
that rigid splatter of the Bronx
becomes organic, logical
as web or beehive. Chunks

of decayed cars in junkyards,
garbage scows (nimble roaches
on the Harlem), herds of stalled
manure-yellow boxes on twisting reaches

of rails, are punched clean and sharp
as ingots in the ignition of the sun.
Rubbish becomes engaging shape—
you only have to get a bead on it,

the right light filling the corridor
of your view—a gob of spit
under a microscope, fastidious
in structure as a crystal. No contortion

without intention, and nothing ugly.
In any random, sprawling, decomposing thing
is the charming string
of its history—and what it will be next. 

"Distance and a Certain Light" by May Swenson, from Collected Poems. © The Library of America, 2013.

Six-Word Memoirs II

Memory was my drug of choice.

--- Pea Hicks

From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Six-Word Memoirs

Macular degeneration.  Didn't see that coming.

--Ian Gould
From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Word for the day: hadal

hadal \HEYD-l\, adjective:

1. of or pertaining to the greatest ocean depths, below approximately 20,000 feet (6500 meters).

2. of or pertaining to the biogeographic region of the ocean bottom below the abyssal zone.

Here a once-living being found the hadal current which twists in the waters of all rivers.
-- Lawrence Norfolk, The Shape of a Boar, 2000

By which I mean, if the earth itself were shrunk to the size of a lemon, the black hadal depths of even the Marianas Trench would be shallower than that moist breath of yours gathered on the lemon's skin.
-- Brad Leithauser, The Friends of Freeland, 1997

Hadal entered English in the mid-1900s, and comes from the name Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.