[Image: “New York Public Library #5,” by Tom Waterhouse. (Found it on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) Interestingly, this is the second image I’ve used here; the first one also accompanied a whiskey river Fridays post, in May of 2017. I have no idea if I’ve used any other photographer’s work more than once — and no idea how to find out, if I have. The shortcomings of technology (especially in the hands of the lazy, ha)!]
From whiskey river:
Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember, or has gotten wrong. Implied in this is our feeling that life demands an answer from us, that an essential part of man is his struggle to remember the meaning of the message with which he has been entrusted, that we are, in fact, message carriers. We are not what we seem. We have had a further instruction.”
(Loren Eiseley [source])
…and:
Nocturne II
August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself
(W. S. Merwin [source])
…and:
The Nightingale in Badelunda
In the green midnight at the nightingale’s northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in trance, the deaf cars race towards the neon-line. The nightingale’s voice rises without wavering to the side, it is as penetrating as a cock-crow, but beautiful and free of vanity. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. I didn’t notice it then, but I do now. Time streams down from the sun and the moon and into all the tick-tock-thankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale’s voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky’s gleaming scythe.
(Tomas Tranströmer [source])
