In Memoriam

He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity.
--George Orwell, speaking of Dickens

"Try write some on the Poetess, Emily Dickinson", I think I promised it with you Dana.
I just want to specify how I encountered her works. Though sometimes in some ways I know I exaggerate things, I'll try my best.
Well to cut the chase, I was reading a book and the book contained a epigraph by Dickinson:

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As Sponges--Buckets--do--

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For --Heft them--Pond for Pond--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--


It was my religious or sacrilegious years that I, with her verses in my back pack, went to a local library everyday, took a chair at one quiet corner, dictionary beside and till the evening comes I stayed with her.
There, I was angry; among elders reading travel brochures; among children with their head absorbed in the comic books; and young students saddled with sacrificial endless studies which in any event would take them to the course unwillingly or willingly identical with their parents'. That the realization someone is living one's life for oneself for ever, and elsewhere on the earth while some other is and was living for all the time was fatal.

I could have shorten their life, if there wasn't law.
They were and are good person, just next to you
for all the time, and that sometimes makes me mammy mad.
But I'll delete these lines, I haven't been meaning to say this kinda age-old jabberwocky.

That the epigraph was, along with the book, one of the most beautiful I've ever seen has had made me cost $147, and which was and is the most expensive buy on my shelves. I needed it; Thomas H. Johnson Harvard Press version, probably to make myself more convinced (on something I don't know) or more decisive. Dunno. No artist ever lived without words in the end, and without books. That's that. I'm just an ordinal reader, willing to change the world but can't, thinking that he's one of those who believes in words but...not so sure.

I'm sorry Dana, I'm not responding to our promise.
Next round sitting, would come by, I hope I can do.

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