and for my next trick

[incandescens]

And that's done, she says, dusting her hands, and got my Exalted assignment in on time. Splendid. I think I'll have a few days of self-indulgence before I actually try to get down to Scales translation.

Tomorrow I get to make the excuses-for-illness. Hopefully they won't take too long, as there will be plenty of work to do.

---

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

-- Wallace Stevens