Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
Lines
People are familiar with ‘the stick’ of the Tea Party… challenging incumbents, flooding the phone lines. What they’re not so much familiar with, and what I want to expand, is ‘the carrot.’ So when a Mitch McConnell, or when a Republican caucus stands firm… we have to reward them.
Long-lived persons have one or two lines which extend through the whole hand; short-lived persons have two lines not extending through the whole hand.
Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.
It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.
The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.
Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.