My Small Boat

As a retort to the frequent and unwelcome question “What are you working on at the moment?”:
Same notes, different order.

A certain dachsund was so long
He hadn’t any notion
How long it took to notify
His tail of his emotion.
And thus it happened though his eyes
Were full of tears and sadness,
His little tail went wagging on
Because of earlier gladness.
Found at The Clock’s Loneliness.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Epitpah of Henry II
I was Henry the King. To me Divers realms were subject, I was duke and count of many provinces. Eight feet of ground is now enough for me, whom many kingdoms failed to satisfy. Who reads these lines, let him reflect, upon the narrowness of death. And in my case behold, the […]

So we beat on, boats, against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Holy Sonnets - XIV
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in […]

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the […]

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic!”

Ah, God, the way your little finger moved
As you thrust a bare arm backward
And made play with your hair
And a comb a silly gilt comb
Ah, God - that I should suffer
Because of the way a little finger moved.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence […]

One service mathematics has rendered to the human race. It has put common sense back where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labelled “discarded nonsense”.