When It's Over, I Want

It Is What I Was Born For - To Look, To Listen, To Lose Myself Inside This Soft World - To Instruct Myself Over And Over.

Poetry Is A Serious Business; Literature Is The Apparatus Through Which The World Tries To Keep Intact Its Important Ideas And Feelings.

I Went To India And Was Quite Taken With It. There's A Feeling There That Things Are Holy First And Useful Second. And In America, We Have It Backwards.

Going To Walden It Isn't Very Far As Highways Lie. I Might Be Back By Nightfall, Having Seen The Rough Pines, And The Stones, And The Clear Water. Friends Argue That I Might Be Wiser For It. They Do Not Hear That Far-off Yankee Whisper: How Dull We Grow From Hurrying Here And There! Many Have Gone, And Think Me Half A Fool To Miss A Day Away In The Cool Country. Maybe. But In A Book I Read And Cherish, Going To Walden Is Not So Easy A Thing As A Green Visit. It Is The Slow And Difficult Trick Of Living, And Finding It Where You Are.

Language Is, In Other Words, Not Necessary, But Voluntary. If It Were Necessary, It Would Have Stayed Simple; It Would Not Agitate Our Hearts With Ever-present Loveliness And Ever-cresting Ambiguity; It Would Not Dream, On Its Long White Bones, Of Turning Into Song.