Without Lifting A Finger

Kind of a cruise for landlubbers: The Queen Mary. No need to exercise my sea legs. We dined at the Chelsea Chowder House (nice but pricey) and watched the city lights turn on. Took the self-guided tour of the boat ex post facto. *

I've certainly lauded him before (see my earlier week celebrating the ABSURD ), but his 200th demands special attention: Happy Birthday S.!!! A few more selected quotes from his papers and journals: It is said that experience makes a man wise. That is a very unreasonable thing to say. If there were nothing still higher than experience, experience would make him mad. In our time book-scribbling is so wretched and people write about things they have never really given thought to, let alone experienced. So I've decided to read only the writings of those who were executed or faced danger in some other way. In every generation most people, even among those who are said to dabble in thought (professors and the like), live and die in the illusion that there is, and if it were granted them to live longer, would persist, a continued straightforward ascent of increasing comprehension. How many experience at all the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical point where i...

Seems like I brought this up last year, so this post will be a little more subdued. Also, it's jumping the gun a bit, but birthdays are always "right around the corner." Sept. 24th: F. Scott's and mine. Sept. 26th: T. S. Eliot's *** Found a quote by T. S. Eliot that might almost fit: "The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down." ~ T. S. Eliot ***