I meant to say something to you and forgot.
Your half tongue-in-cheek comment about the grammarians using the old grammars as vehicles of personal expression, the desperateness of that image...it made me think of a line but I couldn't seize on it...
It came to me just...I had to Google the exact wording...it's Stevens...
“The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.”
That's one of those lines that could be seen to be saying nothing or everything.
I think he probably meant it just as humorously as you probably did.
And I think he's probably speaking to the poets...in a cathartic way...meant to put a soft kibosh on certain hubristic tendencies...i think...
i think therefore i second guess....
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i can't believe i missed this...
like gilbert gottfried, i think i often hide sadness via the placement of my tongue.
within the cheek?
mostly.
while we were talking though of these mysterious makers of dictionaries, the gainless grammarians, i remember continually returning in my thoughts to that character in Middlemarch, the old scholar who never amounts to much and dies in strange solitude among his books.
he's most mysterious for me for the reason that he's one of the only characters for whom it seems George Eliot has no empathy, or even human feeling (which given the breadth of her humanity and spiritual generosity is all the more startling and solemnly sad...)
but isn't it mysterious to be writing to you dear william about something you said three weeks ago, as if it were fresh in your mind?
as for the stevens, i keep wavering between whether he is saying everything or nothing.
it is always annoying not to able to find a suitable closing for a comment.
xoxo. n.
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