I hope you don't feel bad about not stopping. And if I was there, I would have beat up the guy in the Jaguar with you. One bugger in a Jaguar ran my fiancee off the road last week when he was on his way to pick me up from bellydancing. He just didn't care, and started to drift in the boy's lane. When he was just about to hit my car, the boy swerved off the road into a parking lot to avoid the mess. I wonder if your brain automatically switches out of 'think about others' mode when you hop in a Jaguar?
Actually, he's right too, isn't he - because once it's manifest in some way, the mind grasps it and its remembrance is immortal, whereas it's pretty evanescent in the mind alone... I love the way he puts it: "the fitful tracing of a portal"... Sometimes my friends and I would read his stuff and react physically to great lines, jumping up, falling down, etc. Like hearing Hendrix for the first time.
And no, I haven't read that book, or seen the film...but I have the soundtrack!
And I'm really enjoying the music I've been feeling recently!
That's probably my favorite one. But I love them all - such unique changes of focus and angle, each illuminating and expanding the ones before....plus his phenomenal use of language.. and the various references and allusions...
I used to think of that poem as a litmus test for would-be poets. He's set the bar pretty high...
People like that deserve to have their vehicles smashed beyond all recognition. We may not have lended gentry in America, but we sure as hell have people who act like it.
Wow, some people can be such assholes! That would have infuriated me too.
The fact that you still think about the 'event' all these years later shows that you are a caring person. Your circumstances that day prevented you from helping even if you wanted to.
I think the fact that you still feel bad and think about it 15 years later shows, as if you had any doubt, that you are a very different kind of person than the jaguar driver. Compassion is beautiful. (And so is your new profile pic. :-)
"A most inappropriate man in a most unpropitious place" That's my favorite Wallace Stevens line. He's hard to beat for cool precision, and good clear thinking. One of my favorite American poets of his generation, for sure.
back for you.
Dreaming is all I seem to do these days, too..
You know what. I don't even have to tell you again how sweet you are.