since i knew i couldn't get down to toronto for my friend's birthday celebrations, i did the impersonal thing and sent her a book from indigo. and as i was doing this, it occurred to me that i always buy books, or somehow collect and acquire many interesting books to read, but i'm always the last to read them, or many i haven't even gotten around to, and in my memory, it's always because of studying or some test or some exam....it's like, just before i go to bed, if i have a choice between reading anatomy notes or reading a chapter of a mathematician's apology, only during off-peak school season (i.e. the beginning of the term) will i read the apology. only rarely, and when my frazzled studying soul needs soothing do i turn to a peak-exam-season-pre-sleep read of ee cummings' best poem ever, somewhere i have never travelled. i think this is illegal, but here it is, in it's entirety. poetry should be propagated anyway. i once read something by norththrop frye (it was a series of lectures, actually) who wrote something about how literature is not religion (well, it's not supposed to be), but if we close off that imaginative part of us, shut it out of our minds, then something inside of us goes dead. i quite think that is true. reading probably creates highly sensitive and highly attuned people - but high strung as well, and elitist once you get into those heavy german philosophers - but for the good majority of us, it's a way to exist outside of yourself, or at least appreciate something that isn't quite in your linear time, but more timeless. language, i guess, reflects the culture, and thus evolves, but if you really listen to what people say in your daily whatevers (see that?) we all speak in boring, untenable, incorrectly postured sentences. anyway, i remember in high school i got a few english awards, and with my coles gift certificate, i would buy a book, and then have to write a thank you letter to the staff. in grade 12, i was introduced, in that year particularly, to several works of fiction and poetry that really inspired me to read more widely, and to appreciate the structure and art of a single well-constructed sentence; that year i wrote in my letter that i would "surely invest" in F. Scott Fitzgerald and acquire "This Side of Paradise". This particular novel is probably not known and not considered as his best work, and now i feel rather silly that i had been so adamant in proclaiming that THAT was the book i was going to spend their money on, but it so much appealed to me - i adored that book! - because i had never been so moved and awed by so many couplets of words - really, very frequently he would string two words together it was So well strung together. Fitzgerald writes with a rhythm that makes me want to keep reading, just for the words if not for the story. evelyn waugh too, has a style that takes me breath away. anyway, the poem!

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
ant experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in my understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain has such small hands

i really shouldn't write after having quote this poem (and if this is illegal, i'll just put here that this entire blog is random and twelve million monkeys at thirteen billion typewriters could have very easily cranked this out yada yada yada), because nothing can elegantly follow that....okay, so i'll just blubber along...why did i write this. oh, so, now that i have weekdays in london, and evenings virtually free of anything to do except increase my VO2max, i can start catching up with the adventures of kavalier and katz, life of pi, more waugh, less dentistry, and see what i can do with the little piece of plato that i own. what this means is, i'll probably have watched A LOT of boob tube by summer's end...

happy birthday bash.