Mining on a Sunday Evening

Feeling very uninspired all weekend. I came across a little note-book that I made almost 8 years ago in a little workshop at college. I once used it to take all sorts of notes--books I wanted to read, quotations I found interesting, thoughts I had, recipes, "To Do" lists, whatever. Some pages in it are so idiosyncratic that not even I can understand it--only my former self understood what it all meant. Still, I could puzzle out most of it, which was jotted down largely between my senior year of college and the summer after my first year of graduate school. Here's one quote that I found interesting and rather Thoreauvian in its premise:

"Dreams -- We have no dreams at all or very interesting ones. We should learn to be awake in the same way--not at all or in an interesting way." --Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann translation

I suppose that more or less speaks for itself. Unrelated except for its being in this little notebook is this, from John Keats:

"I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may be struck with its brilliance." [spellings from the original, as quoted in Andrew Motion's Keats: a biography]

This was only one mood of Keats' though--at other times, his view was more optimistic, seeing the poet as a sort of physician to mankind, to the mental/spiritual faculties rather than merely the physical body. Any particular poem, though, may participate in one or the other of those states or, for that matter, may not even rise to the level of the former view.

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