Today is my 47th birthday. As often happens on my birthday, we've had our first killing frost. As occasionally happens on my birthday, the baseball team I'm rooting for (this year, the Tigers) has gotten into the playoffs. Otherwise, my day will be quiet: mushroom hunting, chard freezing, book reading, tea drinking, firewood stacking. And then, in the late afternoon, we will all go to Rockland to Tom's opening, and then we will all go out to dinner, and then we will drive home home.

I thought, because it's my birthday and because I've lately been poring over so many books and passages that I haven't read for a long time, that I'd share some of the words that have risen up to me from the past, like yeast or soap bubbles or prosecco or birds. I quote them in no particular order and with no particular intention. Merely, they rise up.

The average man is so crisp and so confident

That I ought to be miserable

Going on and on like the sea,

Drifting nowhere.

All these people are making their mark in the world,

While I, pig-headed, awkward,

Different from the rest,

Am only a glorious infant still nursing at the breast.

[Lao Tzu, The Way of Life, trans. Witter Bynner]

The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know.

[Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory]

Whoever has received knowledge

and eloquence in speech from God

should not be silent or secretive

but demonstrate it willingly.

When a great good is widely heard of,

then, and only then, does it bloom,

and when that good is praised by many,

it has spread its blossoms.

[Marie de France, prologue to the Lais, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante]

Strangely enough I long to write, but do not know what or to whom. This inexorable passion has such a hold upon me that pen, ink, and paper, and work prolonged far into the night, are more to my liking than repose and sleep. In short, I find myself always in a sad and languishing state when I am not writing, and anomalous though it seems, I labour when I rest, and find my rest in labour.

[Francesco Petrarch, letter to the abbot of Saint Benigno, trans. James Harvey Robinson]

Fun I love but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun & Happiness is better than Mirth--I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike.

[William Blake, letter to the Rev. Dr. Trusler]