An Enlightened Classroom

Will I have any thoughts today that are original or worth remembering? Will I have any that are even necessary? Familiar chatter, recycled debris, replay of memory.

Discussions on social media — there are those rare and beautiful times when they take on the spirit of an enlightened classroom, where everyone is teacher and everyone is student, and all questions and answers are respected and encouraged — rare, too, in my own experience of schooling — a rarity for which I was partly responsible.

Had eyes examined. Pupils dilated, eyes healthy, vision corrected to twenty-twenty.

Read The Rambler, Numb. 3. Tuesday, March 27, 1750. A brief, sarcastic history of Criticism. After False Taste, Fraud, and Mischief have had their temporary say, Time leisurely passes its final sentence, without any regard to their determinations.

Read the seventeenth and eighteenth chapters of Middlemarch. Page 259.

All is well, I wrote this poem to be the one

you leave alone and not to worry; to be the two

who see it through, these days so ripe they’re blurry;

to be set down in deep, cold ground,

so late, my love, we’re early.

September 13, 2023.

[ 1866 ]