The King of Sentences

At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant 625 slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. 

--from Jonathan Lethem's "The King of Sentences"

Perhaps Jonathan Lethem is the King of Sentences himself. 

Man and Wife

"On sick days you could escape the movement of the world. It was always difficult to get back into it, to catch up on schoolwork and eat real food again, but this time I wasn't sure I ever wanted to rejoin the world." --Mary Ellen from Katie Chase's "Man and Wife"

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me! 

Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, 


A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me, 


Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself, 


Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? 


And sullen hymns of defeat?

 --Walt Whitman's "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me"

I thought of my junior year when I read this poem. Some poems you feel it right down your spine, and this was it. Last summer I slowly dreaded my junior year. I thought of all those unpleasant Saturday mornings with a standardized test in front of me. I imagined myself with dark circles, with unkempt hair, as a time chaser. And afterwards, into my junior year, when tragedies came I thought of this poem. And then I thought of Whitman. The man I tried to analyze, the man whom I thought was so difficult a poet I peeked in Sparknotes for the first time. But I understood him. That he must have gone through so much more than I have. That I wasn't the only one. 

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

--from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173476 

I read the poem. I have not the faintest idea, but loved this stanza. That time will hold its breath lest it goes away, that you and I will both have it--"the time to murder and create," "that lift and drop a question on your plate." I don't think Eliot uses any hard language here, although he did knock me over by the word "etherized" in the beginning. And what does it mean to have measured your life with a teaspoon, like Prufrock states he has? I cannot even dare to try and analyze this poem, or a line of it. I just like it. 

Hamlet

So I've been very curious about it. About him, actually. How he pretends to be insane after hearing that his father was murdered by his uncle. How clever of him, to act like he's mad but carefully choosing his words, like here:
POLONIUS: Do you know me, my lord?
HAMLET: Excellent well. You are a fishmonger.
Of course literally a fishmonger is someone who sells fish, but what Hamlet implies underneath means one who deals with flesh. He is slyly mocking the King's advisor in a double blow, first calling him a lowly salesperson, then as a dirty dealer.

I just picked up Hamlet a few days ago, and I can't wait to finish it. I had read it in Korean several years ago, had no idea what was happening, gave up, and thought it would be so much better to read it in Shakespeare's own language. So much better, yes, but so much more difficult because of his brilliance.