I open Donald Hall's book, String Too Short to be Saved to these words:
A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. One the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: "String too short to be saved."
I'm not quite sure why that tickles me so much but it does. It says so much like the touch of fog on an entry to summer day.
I'm feeling better. I'm able to sit, just sit, floating upward like a young child. I'm grateful. I see what pain does to a person. Having it lighten and float away is a gift.
I ordered the Donald Hall book on-line. It is used and from a book store in Wichita, KS. On the book mark is a quote from Flannery O'Connor, her book Mystery and Manners:
The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.
Truth. What does it do to our young people to have an election cycle that lasts over two years with such an inattention to a deeper, complex, moral, loving and ethical truth?