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I appreciate everyone's attention over the
course of the last year and a half, and the time we've spent here getting to
know one another. We many of us have become friends, in the way that term is
used these days.
But things are
getting awfully busy around the house, and not everything is just as it ought to
be in a more nearly perfect world. The most valuable resource in our all-too
hectic lives seems to be time, these days. I need to take the time I've spent in
this space, and focus that precious resource in other places, hopefully to
better effect. Too, I'm taking a rather important placement test in mid-March,
and whatever time is not spent tending the domestic garden is going to be spent
in preparation for that. I'll be "out of the office" until then, at least. After
that, I cannot say. If I decide to take this down entirely, I will post a notice
to that effect.
In my absence, I
leave you this, for no particular
reason:
It little profits
that an idle king,
By this still
hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete
and dole
Unequal laws unto a
savage race,
That hoard, and
sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will
drink
Life to the lees: All times
I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have
suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on
shore, and when
Thro' scudding
drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the
dim sea: I am become a name;
For
always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known;
cities of men
And manners,
climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of
them all;
And drunk delight of
battle with my peers,
Far on the
ringing plains of windy Troy.
I
am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch
wherethro'
Gleams that
untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make
an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not
to shine in use!
As tho' to
breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one
to me
Little remains: but every
hour is saved
From that eternal
silence, something more,
A
bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and
hoard myself,
And this gray
spirit yearning in desire
To
follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human
thought.
This is my son, mine own
Telemachus,
To whom I leave the
sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to
fulfil
This labour, by slow
prudence to make mild
A rugged
people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the
good.
Most blameless is he,
centred in the sphere
Of common
duties, decent not to fail
In
offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household
gods,
When I am gone. He works
his work, I mine.
There lies
the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas.
My mariners,
Souls that have
toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me--
That ever with a frolic welcome
took
The thunder and the
sunshine, and opposed
Free
hearts, free foreheads--you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and
his toil;
Death closes all: but
something ere the end,
Some work
of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove
with Gods.
The lights begin to
twinkle from the rocks:
The long
day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends,
'T is not too
late to seek a newer world.
Push
off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my
purpose holds
To sail beyond the
sunset, and the baths
Of all the
western stars, until I die.
It
may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the
Happy Isles,
And see the great
Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much
is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength
which in old days
Moved earth and
heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic
hearts,
Made weak by time and
fate, but strong in will
To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to
yield.
Ulysses
- Alfred Lord
Tennyson
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