Vanity makes ugly, ought
therefore really to kill, instead however it merely injures itself, becoming
“injured vanity.”
- Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks ("The Third Notebook")
“But as I’ve already
said,” Obama noted, “I have had my military and our team look at a wide range
of options.”
- President Barack Obama, August 30, 2013
My vision was already pretty poor before the right eyeball began to spontaneously bleed eight days ago, and everything became a pinkish-red blur, and I say this not to bring a small bit of gratuitous Grand Guignol to this dignified symposium, but to account for how it can have happened that, upon first inspection of the top photo here, I found myself quite disoriented for several moments, unable to sort out just what those curious organisms with the flounced breast feathers are dressed up that way for.
ReplyDeleteIsn't that the truth? Watching some of the morning news programs this morning and over the past several days, I'm feeling the effects of serial whiplash. As a student actor (reluctant and failed variety), my main problem, as I've explained it to my daughter is that I'm unable to remember other people's lines that well and I cannot move and speak those lines at the same time. Consequently, I am, as the song put it, dazed and confused. We still belong to the Quaker Meeting in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, the birthplace of Gen. David Petraeus and just down the road from Goshen, New York, where the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, hails from, and when I'm feeling inadequate I think at least that it wouldn't take me 10 days to pen a short antiwar letter to the newspapers (it's in the form of an Open Letter to the President) or 10 years to commit to painting the building. Which brings me to today's painting tasks, which will take place in the driveway -- a couple of fireplace screens. I'm very sorry to hear about your eye. Our health complaints -- there are a couple -- are much more minor. And I'm pleased to say that our cat Claude's vision is much improved. He had very high blood pressure, which swelled some membranes and he's now feeling and seeing much better and once again taking emptying the wastebaskets and creating collages. And Jane's working on her first paper of the year. She's chosen to write about the final two paragraphs of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which I think is a great choice. Curtis
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