The Great Game (2024 and Tippecanoe Too)

   How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is eternally pestered by women ?  There was that girl at the Akrola by the Ford; and there was the scullion's wife behind the dovecote -- not counting the others -- and now comes this one ! When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am a man and they will not regard me as a man.  Walnuts indeed !  Ho ! Ho !  It is almonds in the Plains !


   When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished. Not before.



          —Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901)

From "In Memory Of W.B. Yeats" (W.H. Auden)

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.