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pleasant surprises
Mar. 6th, 2007 02:23 amHad a very pleasant surprise this morning. Some mail (one of the private services) turned up before I went off to work, and it turned out to be my contributor's copies of the new Exalted: The Wyld book. Before it was out in the shops, even. Too unlikely to be predicted, but very cool to get.
(Seems to have come out quite pretty, too.)
I have Friday this week and all next week off, as I'm using up annual leave before the end of the financial year. Must see how much of the current pile of queries I can clear before I vanish -- especially given that the numbers coming in have been rising over the last few weeks and are still going up. (I do the graphs. I know these things.) Bloody year end. Bloody new classification, too. Oh, the fun of being a clinical coder.
---
At a Lecture
Since mistakes are inevitable, I can easily be taken
for a man standing before you in this room filled
with yourselves. Yet in about an hour
this will be corrected, at your and at my expense,
and the place will be reclaimed by elemental particles
free from the rigidity of a particular human shape
or type of assembly. Some particles are still free. It's not all dust.
So my unwillingness to admit it's I
facing you now, or the other way around,
has less to do with my modesty or solipsism
than with my respect for the premises' instant future,
for those afore-mentioned free-floating particles
settling upon the shining surface
of my brain. Inaccessible to a wet cloth eager to wipe them off.
The most interesting thing about emptiness
is that it is preceded by fullness.
The first to understand this were, I believe, the Greek
gods, whose forte indeed was absence.
Regard, then, yourselves as rehearsing perhaps for the divine encore,
with me playing obviously to the gallery.
We all act out of vanity. But I am in a hurry.
Once you know the future, you can make it come
earlier. The way it's done by statues or by one's furniture.
Self-effacement is not a virtue
but a necessity, recognised most often
toward evening. Though numerically it is easier
not to be me than not to be you. As the swan confessed
to the lake: I don't like myself. But you are welcome to my reflection.
-- Joseph Brodsky
(Seems to have come out quite pretty, too.)
I have Friday this week and all next week off, as I'm using up annual leave before the end of the financial year. Must see how much of the current pile of queries I can clear before I vanish -- especially given that the numbers coming in have been rising over the last few weeks and are still going up. (I do the graphs. I know these things.) Bloody year end. Bloody new classification, too. Oh, the fun of being a clinical coder.
---
At a Lecture
Since mistakes are inevitable, I can easily be taken
for a man standing before you in this room filled
with yourselves. Yet in about an hour
this will be corrected, at your and at my expense,
and the place will be reclaimed by elemental particles
free from the rigidity of a particular human shape
or type of assembly. Some particles are still free. It's not all dust.
So my unwillingness to admit it's I
facing you now, or the other way around,
has less to do with my modesty or solipsism
than with my respect for the premises' instant future,
for those afore-mentioned free-floating particles
settling upon the shining surface
of my brain. Inaccessible to a wet cloth eager to wipe them off.
The most interesting thing about emptiness
is that it is preceded by fullness.
The first to understand this were, I believe, the Greek
gods, whose forte indeed was absence.
Regard, then, yourselves as rehearsing perhaps for the divine encore,
with me playing obviously to the gallery.
We all act out of vanity. But I am in a hurry.
Once you know the future, you can make it come
earlier. The way it's done by statues or by one's furniture.
Self-effacement is not a virtue
but a necessity, recognised most often
toward evening. Though numerically it is easier
not to be me than not to be you. As the swan confessed
to the lake: I don't like myself. But you are welcome to my reflection.
-- Joseph Brodsky
