What I've Been Reading Lately

"It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted." --George Eliot, Middlemarch

* * *

In the middle of the journey of our life

            I found myself astray in a dark wood

            where the straight road had been lost sight of.

How hard it is to say what it was like

            in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense and gnarled

            the very thought of it renews my panic.

It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.

--Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, translated by Seamus Heaney

* * *

Starres have their storms, ev’n in high degree,

                        As well as we.

A throbbing conscience spurred by remorse

                        Hath a strange force:

It quits the earth, and mounting more and more

Dares to assault thee, and besiege thy doore.

--George Herbert, "The Storm"