Tag Archives: Ice Friday

Ice Friday: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

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William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury is more exhausting than a 7-hour hike in the rain and wind of the Scottish Highlands, even with his moments of clarity, akin to coming out of the clouds at the highest ridge:

As I descended the light dwindled slowly, yet at the same time without altering its quality, as if I and not the light were changing, decreasing…20150708_130624He grasped at the hatchet, feeling no shock but knowing that he was falling, thinking So this is how it’ll end, and he believed that he was about to die and when something crashed against the back of his head he thought, How did he hit me there? Only maybe he hit me a long time ago, he thought. And I just now felt it, and he thought, Hurry. Hurry. Get it over with, and then a furious desire not to die seized him and he struggled, hearing the old man wailing and cursing in his cracked voice.

Ice Friday: Richard Blanco

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Richard Blanco’s Only Brother:

We carved an entire range of mountains

out of styrofoam block, covered their peaks

with sand for snow, the slopes with pines,

the valleys with fall maples and live oaks.P1000813

We made great rivers flow on the illusion

of tin foil crinkled and painted royal blue,

crossed them with mighty balsa bridges.P1000891

We placed townspeople where we wanted:

gazing into the shops, gathered at the chapel,

or waiting for the train, lapping obediently

under our command around the village

that took us six years to build, and one day,

in the backyard, we set it on fire, quietly

stood by the flames and let it all vanish.

Ice Friday: Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”

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Suffering and pain are a constant in this life, as the Greek poet Aeschylus attested almost 2,500 years ago in his masterwork Prometheus Bound.

Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside/The prison wall of pain to exhort and teach the one/Who suffers. All you have to say to me I always knew.IMG_4851

Wrong? I accept the word. I willed, willed to be wrong!/And helping humans I found to be troublesome for myself,/Yet I did not expect a punishment as this –/To be assigned an uninhabited desert peak,/Fastened in mid-air to this crag, and left to rot!IMG_5005

Listen, stop wailing for the pain I suffer now./Step on the ground; I’ll tell you what the future holds/For me: you shall know everything from first to last.IMG_4909

Do what I ask you, do it! Share the suffering/Of one whose turn is now. Grief is a wanderer/Who visits many, bringing always the same gift.