The foolishness of bemoaning such consistent niceness was part of my befuddlement.

In several languages, the word that came to mean weather originally meant time (“tempestas” in Latin, English’s root for both “tempest” and “temporal”).

Nate Klug, "Revision and Revenge"

the lyric

Well, it brings in the cosmos. And what is the cosmos? I will pause to offer some definitions at this point. Cosmology, the knowledge of the cosmos, cosmology proper is the knowledge of the universe considered as a whole. And by universe we mean that class of object whose set is filled by a unique instance, that there is no other, that anything we can imagine which we could add to the cosmos is already part of it. That means that the universe is already the most completely prime particular thing. That’s to say, it is the absolute particular, because there is nothing other like it, there is nothing other related to it. It is particular. Knowledge of it is therefore first philosophy, in Aristotle’s sense: the study of being as such, the grounds and condition of being, as it would have been understood, for example, by the pre-Socratic philosophers, or by Newton, or by anyone else in that order. Knowledge of the local and component parts of it, where each set is occupied by numerous instances, where there are more than one kind, is not first philosophy, though it may participate in that. So, if you have a condition of that order, then there is no lyric, because the lyric relies on the gracious condition of metaphor, and metaphor transfers the small into the large, and the one thing into the other; and the lyric is therefore not a condition of the whole, but a condition of the part.

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That’s what they meant, that’s what the ancients meant when they talked about the noble. They meant that it was single. They meant that it participated in the whole. They meant that it communed with the music of the spheres. That’s what they meant by the noble. It is the nineteenth century psychologists, of course, that tell us it means something to do with the class structure. Oh, yes, that’s something which, I guess, you have the old world to thank, and perhaps one or two little off-shoots of Boston.

J. H. Prynne, "Lectures on Maximus IV, V, VI"

Then the puddle, grey, no source, no images;

an ancient dredger drudges in his idle boat.

Arthur Rimbaud, "Memory", trans. Christopher Middleton

Regret, no more the thick young arms of pure grass.

Gold of April moons in the heart of holy bed!

Arthur Rimbaud, "Memory", trans. Christopher Middleton

It, | wan, in a bed blue Heaven has canopied

bespeaks for drape the shade of hill and arch.

Arthur Rimbaud, "Memory", trans. Christopher Middleton

He’s now 5-4 up and serving for the match.

Evans is still rabbiting on, glottal stops all over the place.

Wimbledon 2021 coverage