After-Orts #50
a haiku from a collection in the New Yorker:
Hindsight is 20/
20. But I’ll never look
Back on that damn year.
—Sasheer Zamata
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/a-smattering-of-haiku-for-the-burnout-age
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- White supremacist sentenced to read Pride and Prejudice and other literary classics -
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From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence.
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
-- Aldous Huxley, in an essay (1931), The Rest is Silence
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A TRUE STORY
In February three years ago
On a bitter freezing day
We packed the beer and cooler in the trunk,
For Bemidji bore away.
We launched the boat at half past noon
Though the lake was choked with ice.
The temperature was forty-five below
But we did not think twice.
We had a gallon of peppermint schnapps
And a case of Miller Lite.
We took no poles or lines or bait
For we fish with dynamite.
We lit the fuse and threw it in
And waited for the ice to burst
And we waited awhile, then Jimmy cried, "Oh no,
That was four pounds of bratwurst."
Our spirits fell as our lunch went down
And sank of its own weight,
Then the waters boiled as a hundred walleyes
Went for the bratwurst bait.
A hundred fish leaped out of the water
And we grabbed them with our hands
And filled our bucket and we filled up our boat
And we stuffed them in our pants.
And Jimmy opened a can of beer
To celebrate the catch,
And he reached in his pocket for a big cigar
And I saw him light the match.
The cigar blew Jimmy into East Grand Forks
and me into Duluth,
And since my life was spared that day
I've resolved to tell the truth.
-- Garrison Keillor, in O, What a Luxury (2013)