Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight”:

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Walter Pater, 1873: All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Apple, 2010: All books constantly aspire towards the condition of iPhones.

For good measure: From Mark Strand’s The Monument, the aforementioned hypogeum passage, a morbid, languagey, pseudo-Whitmanesque hyperventilation:

Solemn truths! Lucid inescapable foolishness! None of that for me! To be the salt of Walt, oceanic in osteality! Secure in cenotaph! The hysterical herald of hypogea! The fruit of the tomb! The flute of the tomb! The loot of gloom! The lute of loot! The work of soon, of never and ever! Saver of naught. Naughtiness of severance. Hoot of hiddenness. I give you my graven grave, my wordy ossuary, telltale trinket of transcendence, bauble of babble, tower of tripe, trap of tribute, thought-taxi from one day to the next, nougat of nothing, germ of gemini, humble hypogeum!

I know it’s a little unsporting to pick on Wikipedia writers, but these two bits from the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni article have a strange, almost Zen-like poetic quality:

The Snake Pit
The second level contains a 2 metres deep pit which could have been used for either keeping snakes or collecting alms.

Holy of Holies
The focal point of this room is a porthole within a trilithon, which is in turn framed within a larger trilithon and yet another large trilithon.

Blobs are converging on me today.

• This morning, I randomly find myself reading Wikipedia’s entry on the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni (after googling the word hypogeum, first seen years ago in Mark Strand’s The Monument, never knew what it meant), for which the description of its Oracle Room is: This room has an elaborately painted ceiling, consisting of spirals in red ochre with circular blobs.
• This afternoon, on the Awl: the blobfish.
• This evening, on Twitter: love your blob. (Subsequently clarified.)

Ogden Nash, “The Germ”:

A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.

Monday my annual episode of illness arrives. A stomach bug. Never had one before. Now I know. The bug loses no time grinding me under its great big pathogenic boot heel. That Monday is a lost day, a day of half-awake blanket-wrapped couch convalescence and just about zero higher brain function. Not in the mood for reading, music, movies, any of the standard sick-day comfort media. Only a brief fit of internet — symptom-surfing, of course, to make sure I haven’t got the Helsinkian Pig-Dog Lurgy or something. I subsist on a diet of water. With tentative forays into Gatorade, tonic water, Banana Scream protein mix, and powder-packet bird broth.

Tuesday the bug has departed, I’m mostly better, back to work, dining on bread and soup and Saltines. Laura brings home bottles of vitamin water, which taste of delicious health. I appreciate that the label copy on this one Canadian raspberry-apple vitamin-water bottle ends with Pull it together, friend. (On the French side of the label: Reviens sur terre, mon ami. Come back to earth.)

Still doing the morning swims. Here in the new place I am a little closer to the YMCA than I used to be, but the walk is a little worse. Most of the route is a dreary, narrow Main Street sidewalk, squeezed between road and mesh fence: five lanes of morning-rush traffic on one side, the City Hall construction site on the other. If we ever get any substantial snowfall, it’ll be impossible to walk there without a hundred thousand passing cars and buses showering me from head to toe with evil road slush.

Above: Scene from the chick flick we watch (again) on Friday night. Here we see Tom Hanks confiding to Dave Chappelle his thoughts on the subject of Meg Ryan. The way Tom leans on the word mailbox is, for me, the most excellent part of this Ephronian rom-com cream puff. MAILBOX! He throws his whole upper body into the word, a ridiculous word, he spits out both syllables like he’s hacking up a hairball at stage-whisper volume. As a MAILBOX! Good-looking as a MAIL-BOX! Comedy is mysterious. (Side note: In the twelve years since this movie came out, Meg Ryan has had so much Work done — hideous Jokeresque lip implants and cheek implants and great gales of Botox and so on — that she now kind of actually does look like a mailbox.)

Jerome K. Jerome, 1889, replying: “You are an untruther.”

Craig Ferguson, in his 13 January 2010 monologue, on Pierce Brosnan’s starring in the Mamma Mia! movie: “Once you play James Bond, you can’t do musicals! Sean Connery would never do a musical! [sings, in Connery voice:] ‘The hills are alive … with the sound of PUNCHING …’”

Monday, lunch break: I spend half an hour down at the self-storage warehouse, stepping cautiously up and down a snow-slippery loading ramp, working on emptying out the storage unit we’ve been renting since 2008. Not much is left in there. I load up the car with boxes, most of which, I note, only contain smaller boxes, some of them with even smaller boxes inside them, Matryoshka-style. The smallest boxes are empty. So basically for the past several months we’ve been paying for a storage unit in which to store other, smaller storage units, which themselves we only use to store even smaller storage units, which themselves don’t store anything. (Some of the boxes do contain actual matter, but it is almost all unwanted junk, and I am only bringing the junk back home so I can throw it, and the boxes it sat in, away.)

Stephen Scaer:

EPITAPH FOR LOT’S WIFE

She was driven to distraction.
Now she helps with winter traction.

Reluctant postscript to that exquisite Annie Dillard quote: Annie, you broke my heart. The Living has so much brilliant, beautiful writing in it, but at some point the novel in all its sprawling historical scope becomes sheer homework to read, and takes me forever to finish. So many characters and so many narrative plates spinning, in my mind they blur together into all the same character, and all the same plate. Three-quarters of the way through, slogging, losing steam, I revisit her book The Writing Life, to remind myself of why she’s one of my favorite authors, even though on her website she labels The Writing Life an “embarrassing nonfiction narrative”. In fact her apparent embarrassment kind of makes me like that book, and her, even more.

Annie Dillard, The Living: She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live; she read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.