an old favorite

Way back, when i came to the conclusion that i might never be accepted into the veterinary college of my university (very few women did, in those days), i decided to study my first love (literature, talk about useless) instead.  My first semester of THAT, i took an American Poetry class that i STILL remember (and still own the book, it was that good).  One of my favorite poems of the era:

URIEL

It fell in the ancient periods

Which the brooding soul surveys,

Or ever the wild Time coined itself

Into calendar months and days.

 

This was the lapse of Uriel,

Which in Paradise befell.

Once among the Pleiads walking,

Seyd overheard the young gods talking;

And the treason, too long pent,

To his ears was evident.

The young deities discussed

Laws of form, and metre just,

Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,

What subsisteth, and what seems.

One, with low tones that decide,

And doubt and reverend use defied,

With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere,

Gave his sentiment divine

Against the being of a line:

"Line in nature is not found;

Unit and universe are round;

In vain produced, all rays return;

Evil will bless, and ice will burn."

As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,

A shudder ran around the sky;

The stern old war-gods shook their heads,

The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;

Seemed to the holy festival

The rash word boded ill to all;

The balance-beam of Fate was bent;

The bounds of good and ill were rent;

Strong Hades could not keep his own,

But all slid to confusion.

 

A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell

On the beauty of Uriel;

In heaven once eminent, the god

Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;

Whether doomed to long gyration

In the sea of generation,

Or by knowledge grown too bright

To hit the nerve of feebler sight.

Straightway, a forgetting wind

Stole over the Celestial kind,

And their lips the secret kept,

If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But now and then, truth-speaking things

Shamed the angels' veiling wings;

And, shrilling from the solar course,

Or from fruit of chemic force,

Procession of a soul in matter,

Or the speeding change of water,

Or out of the good of evil born,

Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,

And a blush tinged the upper sky,

And the gods shook, they knew not why.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1847)

one-trick ponies and other literary crimes

My reading is usually "all over the place."  I read blogs and the studies/articles to which they link; i read vintage fiction for relaxation; i read esoteric material from respected sources; i read a few modern writers of nonfiction; i read LOTS.

One thing i resent, however, are the books that say the same friggin' thing over and over and OVER, so as to have enough material to fill a book, and it's been my sad experience to do that lately.  "Fiber Menace" and "The Carnitine Miracle" fall under this heading.  Read the website, and google the subjects, and you'll waste less time and money.

Then there are the ones which should be considered primers for the uninitiated.  The reason i HAVEN'T ordered "Primal Blueprint," "It Starts with Food," and a number of others is, i don't need to be told the basics AGAIN.  I've skipped so many paragraphs in "Primal Body, Primal Mind" after reading the first sentence....  The "body" half of the book told me almost nothing new, and enough that i disagree with, that i'm not sure i'll be able to believe what i read in the second half (the "mind" part), about which i know significantly less.

I haven't finished "Excitotoxins" yet, and it's been months.  It is singularly unreadable, even though he presented plenty of material.  Not so "Good Calories, Bad Calories," which some people complain about due to the large amount of material -- some authors CAN, and others CAN'T write worth a damn.  I "breezed" through GCBC in a very short time, like the first time i read "The Lord of the Rings."  Nonfiction doesn't HAVE to be dry and unappealing.

I suppose i should go to amazon.com and leave reviews, though i can think of a thousand more attractive ways to spend my time.  Before i buy books, i generally read the highest and the lowest reviews, to get a hint of how they please various audiences -- that's one of the best features of the site.  If only there were a ranking system:  THIS is a 101 sort of book, and THAT is a 301....

I wonder if you can sell back a Kindle book?