Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Two

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”

― Robert Jordan

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day One

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

Dystopian desktop towards the end of November

Sylvia Plath wrote 'Wind warns November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious'. But she was born in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Coincidentally, her father, Otto, was from Grabow (in Germany) and wrote about bumblebees.

Chekov's Brother

One of the left tributaries of the River Dnieper is the Psyol which flows through Russia and Ukraine. About this time of year (November) it starts to freeze. If you check around here you will come across hares, foxes, deer , wild boar and beavers.  The river flows through the city of Sumy which, during the revolution of 1905, became famous throughout Russia for in effect having established an independent peasant republic.

Don't take it to heart

Alliances come and go, but the River Dnieper (mentioned by Herodotus in the 5th century BC) flows on and goes on - forever (or at least since the 5th century BC). 

Having been persuaded (by a sharp salesman) into buying her DNA profile, Magritude Feather has traced her roots back to a tiny village between Kiev and Smila. This is puzzling since (although she was born in Wyoming) her father was Irish, and her mother a Sephardi Catalan.

(Feel free to comment)

What more could I ask for?

Then there's the elephant in the room...

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind. (E. M. Forster)

Eternity in an hour...

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. (Wm. Blake)

Scaramouche

Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very fright'ning 

Two kids get on a bus...

Here's the thing, just yesterday I was sitting on the number 7 bus, and two school kids got on and started talking about Brodsky. I don't know why I was so surprised (mind you they still kept checking their mobiles as they talked).

What gets left of a man amounts
to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech. 
(Joseph Brodsky, 1976)

The Banlieue of Lompleques

Although it is an irrefutable fact that we all invent ourselves, it is seldom done with the deliberate forethought that Fabio Gerentless gave to his creation. But his first project was to construct an imaginary world in which to set his new character, for although he was at peace in his new environs in New Caledonia, Noumé itself did not satisfy his creative urge. So stone by stone, house by house, street by street, he brought into being the banlieue of Lompleques (it being understood that his use of the term banlieue had specific exotic connotations).

The Extraordinary Diary of Fabio Gerentlas

When Fabio Gerentlas reached the venerable age of fifty-six he looked back on his life with little satisfaction. He had done what people had expected, he told himself. But inside he felt he had let himself down. He had not achieved anything that he himself would accept as worthwhile.

And so in his fifty-seventh year he resolved to change everything. He resigned from his job as an administrator in the Government Actuary’s Department advising his superiors on project and enterprise risk, divorced his unsuspecting wife and bought a one-way ticket to New Caledonia. Here in Nouméa he set up household with a kanak teacher who taught French officials how speak Drehu. As Fabio's creative skills were primarily literary (he had little artistic or musical ability), he decided that he should become a diarist - but life was simple and uneventful, so he devised instead a fictional record of extraordinary complexity. And the main motif was time.