Blog... Interrupted

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
"A Psalm of Life"
Longfellow

I'd be willing to bet that if we were to poll 10,000 Americans under the age of forty, fewer than 500 could identify Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and fewer than 100 could honestly claim to have read any of his works.

Having been exposed to what seemed, at least in eighth grade, to be the stifling, irrelevant and interminable bathos of Evangeline, I can't see this as a major cultural tragedy. Nonetheless, like so many of the poets who wrote [here I get lost for three-hours, while I wander, lonely as a cloud, through various discussions of poetic theory, culminating in a lengthy, albeit fruitless, consideration of negative capability]... narrative verse, Longfellow does speak to the dilemma of the common man.

Anyway: it's widely understood that man is driven, in significant measure, to create some monument to his existence, some ontological...

A typical ADHDan tragedy: I started to write this yesterday. Got a phone call. Forgot to write even the briefest of notes so that I'd be able to pick up the path again. And here you see the result: a half-done, useless, depressing (I was really into something, honest) mess. Once again, metaphysical considerations are trumped by the failure to use a Post-it. If the thread of this comes back to me while I'm out fishing this afternoon, I'll finish it; otherwise...