i'm over at teaforks today, keeping the hip and the hippies in check.
meanwhile, back over here I'm still trying to figure out how on earth to prepare for graduate school. Craig pointed out this weekend that making tenure's probably no harder than making partner at a law firm. he's right, but i got a lot of reading left to do. and about fifteen years of life.
Apropos of nothing, the first two lines of Donne's "A Valediction: Of Weeping":
"Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face whilst I stay here..."
I love how dizzyingly unstable physical proximity is here. The speaker's tears seem almost to be running down the beloved's face, so much so that the reminder of the lovers' separation implicit in "whilst I stay here" comes as a jolt to me. The abstraction of "Let me pour forth/ My tears" has collapsed into a statement of both loss and identity. In a poem about separation, "I stay here" acknowledges the boundedness of being oneself--both "I" and "here" refer to states from which the lover is excluded.
(oof--not going to organize this into a real paragraph. it's just a pretty poem-moment.)
