• Tag Archives vanitas

  • Love’s Fatal Flaw

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                            Waning Planting Moon

    When I punched Delta 2406 into Google, it delivered a website called Flight Status.  On Flight Status I could watch the progress of Kate’s flight from San Francisco as she moved across Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota and into Minnesota.  I looked over at the computer occasionally as I worked in Chapter 18 of Wheelock:  passive voice and the ablative of agent.  It seemed natural to me to go from ancient Rome to a computer tracing the flight path of a jet traveling 595 mph.

    The term soulmate may not make sense to me metaphysically and I am an existentialist at heart–we die alone, we live alone–however I know my life is not complete without Kate.  Over time and with much love our lives have intertwined, her presence, her physical presence is important to me and to my well-being.

    I’m a little afraid to admit that, in part to myself.  What if she dies?  Well, she will.  And so will I.  Also, I don’t want to seem so needy that I require another person to complete myself.  And I don’t.  Yet Kate makes the house full.  Talking and crying with her about Emma made the whole sad thing real and bearable.

    Here is the paradox of love.  To love we need to be vulnerable, to open ourselves and let another person assume a critical and necessary place in our life, yet life itself has an end.  In this sense, I suppose, each love is a tragedy, that is, it has a literally fatal flaw.

    She’s back and I’m glad.


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  • Vanitas

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

    A Woolly brother goes in for knee surgery on Monday.  He’s a bright guy who will select a surgeon with care.  He’s also good at taking care of himself so I’m sure the surgery and the recovery will go well.

    These are the years when retirement income and the upcoming procedure can fill a lot of conversation.  The body degenerates, the centre does not hold, things fall apart.  The way of it, this human, animal, mammal, finite life.

    I had planned to check on my bees tomorrow, see if they pollen patty needed replacing and put on a syrup feeder, but the weather guy says cloudy, cool and wet.  Not a good bee day.  Like many of us, bees stay home when the weathers inclement and they don’t like uninvited guests.  Really don’t like them.  Sunday or Monday look better.  I’ll wait.

    Kate and I are through Chapter 9 in Wheelock, closing in this week on Chapter 10.  We also got a book of readings and now do sight reading in each session in addition to the readings in the book.  This last reading was from Seneca about slaves and masters.  It’s moving.  The issues of slaves and slavery is old, very old and the issues of freedom and the injustice of slavery is also old, very old.

    The more we work with the Latin the more I become committed to classical scholarship and the doors it opens into human thought, human thought not in dialogue with Christianity, but with the world of Athens.  This is a world both intimately connected to us, yet very foreign, too.  It is pagan, though that’s an anachronism, since before Christian dogma, there were other religions, not paganism.

    I’m still pumped about the health care reform even if it fell short of single-payer.  That’s for later.  Right now, let’s party.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Humanities Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged