Carpe Diem
Tag: Books
What is Wisdom?
not old body parts: craggy eyebrows, gray hair, beard, failing eyes, not dusty books: shakespeare, socrates, aurelius, arendt, not words: erudite, precocious, sagacity, percipence, not education: cambridge, oxford, harvard, princeton, not military: combat, boot camp, target practice, bombing, not politics: president, judge, senator, prime minister, not bragging: instagram, birkin bag, nantucket house, porsche panamera, but rather: nameless nature, lakes, oceans, trees, mountains, timeless, perhaps one day dead, but still wiser than….
Reading & Billie Eilish
some question the point, why not just watch a screen, text, talk on the phone. why leave friends to immerse with already dead authors? why visit streets where horses pull carriages and fast food doesn’t exist? paper pages, turning them, what a chore. who wants to detach, disconnect from internet, iphone, streaming shows, online shopping? yet, somehow this has become me, always was me, by fireplace, under quilts, narnia, watership down, the hobbit, the color purple, quiet moments, alone, reading, reading, reading, imagination, walking with holden caulfield, questioning the phonies, the ones feeding us cookies, tracking our every electronic move, urging us to fear the next disaster- to quote billie eilish, when reading a book, no one can hurt you.
21st Century Greek Scholar
when studying the ancient greeks there are rules: the oracle knows, socrates questions, plato governs, and aristotle examines nature. when trying to be esoteric, mention more details: delphi, the agora, the republic, syllogism. and if that still doesn’t work, forget alexander the great’s library, dusty old books, like the histories of herodotus, instead, go to wikipedia and pretend.
The Screen Reaper
The screen reaper has taken all the books away. The ones we used to read by the fireplace, or on the rug, or in bed, or underneath a tree. The screen reaper doesn’t care about your memories or narrative works assembled on page after page, plots, characters, all those stories shaped in your head. No, instead it offers the everything/nothing, of videos, tv shows, movies, colorful clothes draped on dancing bodies, never-ending updates, snap maps, instagram images, and tiktok temptations. The screen reaper wants it all, all of you, your eyes, brain, mind, and time.
And most of us never fight back, we open the computer, clutch the clicker, scroll with our very own fingers, authors of our demise. The screen reaper has taken all the books away, and yet we let it stay, perhaps forever, it will be this way.
At McKay’s
the poetry section is a jumble of
paperbacks, anthologies, Chaucer
Elizabeth Bishop, Neruda, Donne
Dickinson, page after bent page
used books, leaning paper spines
the dead supporting each other
most of their words long forgotten
USA $29.95, once the price of wisdom
now two dollars, time erases money
and memories of Isla Negra
Amherst lilacs, and all the rest
Diary of a Wimpy Kid at Vanderbilt
Fun event with Jeff Kinney (Author of the Series).
Internet Will Save Us
It used to be just books,
parchment and a quill,
perhaps the trunk of an
old oak tree for support
during pauses to reflect
on words, cradling novel’s
spine. This was before the
nothing of everything, lurking
images, news, videos, email,
promising connection to a
world of always distraction,
attempts to evade our depth,
knowing that internet will save
us from ourselves, but the longer
we stare into that flat abyss,
the more we disappear.
Daniel W. Polk 