Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare - Dante, Canto II, Inferno

Beatrice, your sorrow is like the blue light Before sunset. You are as wounded now As I was leaving your veranda of farewell.

You envy their worldliness, the nights they Have lived in distant provinces of the empire, Drinking with the natives by the sea.

But who is to say our provincial childhoods Were less beautiful, yours practicing the klavier Scales, and mine in the butterfly's shade?

This homesickness for the other, where Does it begin? And why do we value The familiar comfort of a quite room

So little? What answer to your question What would have been the content Of our fates hadn't the path forked?

We say to ourselves this stranger will Lead us back to paradise that we have lost. We say tomorrow there will be another

Fragrant night at the end of this night Of lovemaking. We say few more cities are Required to grow into our strange skins.

We say we will chose wisely next, and Will try to love that lover a little more. All the while forgetting too much of where

The heart had been as it leaps over the chasm That is every morning. It is morning again. So farewell till we meet by Charon's boat

Carrying for scuffed coins our battered hearts.

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library", wrote Borges, expressing what is a literal truth for those of us who grew up with minimal access to libraries. During the school years, one of the most awaited period of time for me was the so called "library period" - a forty five to fifty minute gap in reality, where any kind of escape (I usually preferred histories and historical characters) was possible, and available between the covers of a book. And now years later, living in a different country, the first thing I do when visiting new cities is pay a visit to their public libraries - walking the fiction and poetry racks in a sufficient litmus test of whether a city and me will find each other agreeable.

But now we have Cassandra aka CNN singing praises of "Library 2.0", which from my understanding of it not a library at all. Instead it is a "digital learning center", a "community gathering center", a place with "conversational loops" (powered by Twitter and Facebook apparently - are great conversations haikus?), with all this goodness helmed by with-it "information specialists" (who apparently "wear tattoos, piercings and dress like they belong on the streets of Brooklyn instead of behind bookshelves" - oye CNN, why no skinny jeans? why no Converse shoes?)...

All of which just made me puke - so excuse me while I clean the mess.

In the corn fields, the south wind combs and combs the tall stalks of damascene green.

In the red stall, the speckled bay and the brown pony are drowsing, tails flicking.

In the sugar maple grove, a summers' day - the kind that generates metaphors for fair maidens - is sieving its golden grain.

And a blue blue sky, without a cloud or a shadow, until a hawk glides in with its winter eye.

Everything is changing, and is so...

Dhamma Pakasa, Illinois Lunch hour, day 9 of a 10 day silent meditation retreat August 5-16, 2009