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Showing posts with the label Before the Deluge

Fifty Shades of May

A spring day in May has the power to make a person feel young again, even when that is no longer true. Why? Spring brings hope. Things return to life, pointing toward the radiance of summer. Age feels powerless against imminent waves of heat.  Spring means I can't help rolling down the car windows to let the wind blow through my hair and let the stereo blare Jackson Browne's “Before the Deluge.” I don't think I'll be dying in spring because the prospects of lying in the sand by the ocean shore lifts my soul above the declines of the rest of the year. People move to Florida to escape chill of fall and winter, but if the reality of those seasons does not catch you then their shadowy metaphors soon enough will. So I plan to stay up North and ride out the seasons until they get the best of me. Today's luminous leaves are suspended on firm branches so green and secure, and will remain so for several months. But you can be sure that fall's chill will begin to fell ...

Quiet Desperation

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Henry David Thoreau After watching Dead Poets Society over the weekend and hearing Thoreau's quote, I cannot get it out of my head. The weight of its truthfulness is bearing down on me. I think I am living a life of quiet desperation, the grand ambitions of youth replaced by "the resignation that living brings" to quote Jackson Browne's " Before the Deluge ." I think resignation and desperation go hand-in-hand. Desperation is the feeling. Resignation is one of its sources. Maybe most us reach that place where we resign ourselves to making a living because our families need us to do that. We step aside and let the next generation have their shot at life. "Happily ever after fails, we've been poisoned by these fairy tales" (Don Henley,  End of the Innocence ). Life never delivers what it promises, and this hollow ringing sound of resignation is even found among the famous and the su...