Updates on my 101 tasks, 1001 days:

--I finished T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. I have read them before, but not with real effort. These are poems that take effort. I found them very beautiful and moving, even if I do still prefer Ash Wednesday.

The lines that are always quoted:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Are, to me, quoted far too easily. They are resonant and beautiful, but to take that set out of Little Gidding (the last Quartet) is to somehow miss the point. Until the reader has moved through the temporal longing of Burnt Norton, the paradox and decay in East Coker, and the pitiless sea of The Dry Salvages, this realization--this closing benediction--lacks its full meaning. The enlightenment of this moment cannot be reached without the pain and angst and drought that comes before, or it leans into Hallmark, not epiphany.

I love these poems more than I thought I would.

--(Veering wildly into the banal) I'm also seven days away from being without soda/pop for a month. I miss it. I don't miss burping all the time, but I miss root beer and spritzer and fizz.



I now have two major party ideas...more are forming...there will be a final idea...

And the cat is irritated at me because as I type, my fingers occasionally hit her tail. Well, if she puts it on the keyboard...Sweet ooblet, smelling of basil.