Here is another look at the turning down of the gift of a museum in SF.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/04/BAKU18ICI7.DTL
I have been re-reading Robert Baer's book, See No Evil. After my cousin died, his daughters were informed this book would give them insights into what their father did. It is odd to read it from that perspective. He would never talk about his work, never. We would tease and probe, and absolutely nothing ever came through.
I learned yesterday that the blurbs of support we see splattered on books are often based on reading an excerpt, not the whole book. How can we know a book from an excerpt? I realize now that the blurb is publicity for the one who writes it. It seems like a game to me that lessens the depth and exploration of what is written, the time a book may deserve.
We have been analyzing poems on Connection Well. We go over and over them, commenting, re-evaluating, dissecting, and learning more and more about ourselves as we turn the poem on a lathe of our own uncovering. This week the poems were on friendship and yet friendship in ways we may not usually think of it, friendship with ourselves.
This poem feels appropriate to me for the values of Independence Day.
Incantation
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
Berkeley, 1968
Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky
Czeslaw Milosz, "Incantation" from The Collected Poems: 1931-1987. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 (The Ecco Press, 1988)