when you are old

I used to envision myself, fifteen years ago, as having finished my doctorate and happily teaching knucklehead freshmen the importance of the English Language and the Written Word. I should have seen where things were going when in my own freshman lit class there was a reading selection from an episode of Northern Exposure.

I don't say this in a bad way.

Coleridge. Spenser. Yeats. Byron.

J.M.W.Turner. Bacon. Monet. Lichtenstein.

Theroux. Chandler. Chatwin. Palahniuk.

I had a library of nearly a 1000 books. Now I just copy and paste:


When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

*

Yeats, before he got all mystical and crapped out some of his best work. Ha. I used to have Sailing to Byzantium memorized.

How far we have fallen.