An Instructive and Nostalgically Rewarding Day

I got up yesterday in a pleasant fog of recollections of the summer of 1964, when I was one and twenty, making a very indifferent pretense of going to college, and, in fact, hanging out in (our mystic hippie den mother's) Toni Pugh's rooming house, smoking pot, eating peyote, listening to Bossa Nova and Mozart piano concertos, and endlessly gassing with (Joseph) Patrick McClelland--who was not only the same age as me, and a Virgo, but who shared, exactly, my sense of humor and honor and justice, and who could--and did, on several occasions, with amazing accuracy--"read" my mind.  Patrick, actually, was going to school, though not taking very many credit hours because he was also working part-time at the student dining hall;  he was taking, as I recall, modern American literature, and French romantic poetry.  Patrick very much liked John Steinbeck, particularly Cannery Row, and most especially the 'Palace Hotel' in it, which he said "Madame's" (as we, between us, called Toni)'s establishment closely resembled.  But I was never then or later much interested in Steinbeck--what cemented Patrick's and my friendship was the French romantic poetry, which never failed to dissolve us into hysterical hilarity.  How many times did we recite the 'Nuit de Mai' and 'Nuit d'Octobre' to one another, till we had virtually memorized it?  And always and always when we got to the lines,

       Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,

       Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots,

we'd be rolling on the floor with tears in our eyes of incredulous sarcastic glee.  And so, as I woke yesterday, I was reciting, with suitably over-the-top lugubriousness,

       Lorsque le Pélicane lassé d'un long voyage

       Dans les brouillards du soir retourne a ses Roseaux....

full of the haunting beauty and preposterous silliness of the poetry of my youth, I turned on my computer as always when I'm in a reflective mood, thinking to wallow a bit in the bye-goneness of it all; but, by accident or misclick, evoked the other French romantic poetic Alfred--de Vigny--instead of de Musset, and the title of a poem which I had never read before:  'La Mort du Loup' which, then and therewith reading, I discovered to be one of the greatest goddamned poems I have ever read.  Ever.  As poem.  As philosophy.  As art.  As fuckin' Religion.  Not even Goethe or Virgil cuts this close to my metaphysical bone.

So, after perusal, and re-reading, and reflection, and laying aside in my PC Reading List, I turned to the Paradiso, and found this:

          Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia

          nostro intelletto, se 'l ver non lo illustra

          di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia;

          posasi in esso, come fera in lustra

          tosto che giunto l'ha; e giugner puollo:

          se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra.

Which is all and everything I mean to assert about the Inner Voice and Conscience of Inarguable Truth which I posit, and which posits me, as an American Transcendentalist.

And putting Dante aside, I then turned to Netflix and watched two movies in a row:  Up at the Villa, which I had seen last fourteen years ago and thought wonderful, with its aristocratic, clockwork-like Somerset Maugham plot and evocation of Italian fascism, and with its wonderful farewell performance by Ann Bancroft, and not farewell but still wondrous workmanlike performances by Sean Penn and Derek Jacobi, playing characters utterly unlike (I think) their own. And secondly I watched It's a girl, less a movie than a clever documentary about the male-skewed gender imbalance in India and China; which basically said that the reason having more men than women in a society is wrong is that this means women are valued less than men.  So?