"The Peace of Wild Things"

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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-- "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

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January 2005

Working on my Three Journal and picking up the thread on my entries from January of 2005, I am happily surprised to see that Gabe started e-mailing me already. I thought that was going to be another couple of months yet.

It changes the plan. I was going to go through these months quickly, picking just a few favorite entries and moving on, but I like what I am seeing and I want to stay, and so I will. I am thinking about picking up all my conversations with both Gabe and Sugar for the rest of January before moving back to the stagnant and sterile nineties. It looks like there is quite a bit of material, happily enough, and this could last a while, so that I might get restless, but we will see. Like I said, I kind of like what I am seeing, and I like what I am feeling. I am at a high-point in January 2005 in my e-life, and I may not mind dwelling there for a while.

laptop

My laptop is pulling that old shit again, refusing to come back on when I flip the top open. Very tiresome.

I'm reminded that I have too many accounts to log onto for somebody with no e-life. In principle, I should be able to do with only one account, perhaps the LJ one, since I do get some important news feeds there, and it is the one place where I can entertain some expectation of contacts.

But why do I have to make do?

Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck. Death by a thousand cuts.

Jefferson in Paris

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All the while [decrying French aristocracy], Jefferson clung to a vision of France as America’s fraternal ally. “Nothing should be spared on our part to attach this country to us,” he wrote to Madison. While scorning French political arrangements, Jefferson adored his life in that decadent society. He relished Paris - the people, wine, women, music, literature, and architecture. And the more rabidly antiaristocratic he became, the more he was habituated to aristocratic pleasures.

Jefferson fancied himself a mere child of nature, a simple, unaffected man, rather than what he really was: a grandee, a gourmet, a hedonist, and a clever, ambitious politician. Even as he deplored the inequities of French society, he occupied the stately Hotel de Langeac and the Champs Elysees, constructed for a mistress of one of Louis XV’s ministers. Jefferson decorated the mansion with choice neoclassical furniture bought from stylish vendors. The philosopher in powdered hair employed a coachman, a footman, a valet - seven or eight domestics in all, a household staff so complete that it included a froteur whose job consisted solely of buffing the floors to a high gleam. Jefferson’s colossal shopping sprees in Paris - he bought two thousand books and sixty-three paintings - betrayed a cavalier disregard for his crushing debts as well as the slaves whose labor serviced them. While Jefferson’s Parisian life seems to contradict his politics, he was embraced by a group of Enlightenment aristocrats who exhibited the same exquisite contradictions.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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Daily Fun

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