Reading Wordsworth

An image can grow on you, like evening light hitting a corner building, softly.

Even a flag becomes acceptable to a man who'd like to find--and live in--a country that didn't believe in flags.

An image can actually mean something, like a good Dutch painting.

Sight is random, and even when it strikes you can't be sure what you're seeing.

If money is, as Niall Ferguson says it is in "The Ascent of Money", the "crystallized relationship between creditor and debtor" how did it come to be the great abstraction it's now become? (5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, acc. the NY Times, Sunday Sept. 4, 2011).

Historians have concluded that a culture's memory of its past has a profound influence on its future, even in the case of the formation of the concept of a classical Europe. "When the palatial systems on Crete and the mainland collapsed, their inheritance to the next generation was meagre...but these palatial cultures loom large...first, the palaces were run by people who spoke Greek...secondly, memories of this period were crucial to the Greeks, Romans and other peoples...For them the Trojan War and its immediate aftermath formed the upper horizon of their consciousness of the human past, and became the foundation of European identity." ("The Birth of Classical Europe", Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, Viking, 2011).

The beginning of time was, most likely, not a pretty place. An admixture of creation and destruction, quite possibly. Quite possibly, nothing as we now know it survived.

By all scholarly reports, language was developed to keep records, for the administrative purposes of the state.

We might admire then the poet William Wordsworth who watched an acorn fall from an oak tree and stayed in the forest "till the sun had almost touched the horizon." (Prelude, Book 1).