A bit of breathing space during lunch today finds me listening to Schubert's "Trout", reading essays on Saul Bellow's excellent middle period novels and on the uses of reading poetry (h/t Swami), and then reading sections from the latest volume of Galway Kinnell's poems that I had bought this past weekend called "When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone" (very appropriately titled I think given my states of being have been slowly shifting from solitude to socializing). Here is an excerpt from the eponymous sequence of poems:

"When one has lived a long time alone, one falls to poring upon a creature, contrasting its eternity's-face to one's own full of hours, taking note of each difference, exaggerating it, making it everything, until the other is utterly other, and then, with hard effort, possibly with tongue sticking out, going back over each difference once again and canceling it, seeing nothing now but likeness, until . . . half an hour later one starts awake, taken aback at how eagerly one drops off into the happiness of kinship, when one has lived a long time alone."