Met with no traffic during this morning’s run through the neighborhood. Back in the house before four-thirty. A starry sky, with a bright, waning, super-blue moon. Air clean and free of wildfire smoke.
Spanish. Read a page of Juan Valera’s Pepita Jiménez.
Italian. Read a passage from a translation of Homer’s Iliad.
How much of effort is really the reaffirmation of one’s ego-identity?
Axe, muscle, gravity. But when I chop wood, effort is required. This applies as well to writing a poem. Why should one think of it as work? Does it take effort to prune a tree or scrub a floor, or are the acts simply a using of energy, more or less efficiently? And what of pleasure, what of joy? Shouldn’t they arrive in equal wordless measure engaged in all things, in a kind of participatory silence or dance?
Thoreau’s journal, February 12, 1854. Ice skates and the thundering of the pond.
September 2, 2023.
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[ 1855 ]
Categories: If It Had A Name
Tags: Dance, Effort, Ego, Energy, Homer, Ice Skates, Identity, Iliad, Italian, Journals, Joy, Juan Valera, Pepita Jiménez, Pleasure, Reading, Running, Silence, Smoke, Spanish, Stars, The Moon, Thoreau, Translations, Wildfires, Work, Writing
William Michaelian 