W. Somerset Maugham on Ancestral Lands

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.


—from The Moon and Sixpence
W. Somerset Maugham, 1919

Chesterton on Poetry and Cheese

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." --G.K. Chesterton


We are going to change that in February.  Readers are invited to submit poems of any form and length to Students Publish Here. The theme is cheese!

The best of the lot will be published. 

• Deadline: February 20, 2012
• Include first and last name; grade in school and email address
• Submit to aproeditor-at-gmail-dot-com

Best wishes  for the new year!
Alice C. Linsley

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,


And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;



Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,



And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I marked the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.



I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

--Robert Frost
 
 
Related reading:  Robert Frost on the Heavens; Spring: Time of Mud
 

A Winter Ode

A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida



Risen from rented rooms, old ghosts

Come back to haunt our parks by day,

They crept up Fifth Street through the crowd,

Unseeing and almost unseen,

Halting before the shops for breath,

Still proud, pretending to admire

The fat hens dressed and hung for flies

There, or perhaps the lone, dead fern

Dressing the window of a small

Hotel. Winter had blown them south--

How many? Twelve in Lummus Park

I counted, shivering where they stood,

A little thicket of thin trees,

And more on benches, turning with

The sun, wan heliotropes, all day.



O you who wear against the breast

The torturous flannel undervest

Winter and summer, yet are cold,

Poor cracked thermometers stuck now

At zero everlastingly,

Old men, bent like your walking sticks

As with the pressure of some hand,

Surely they must have thought you strong

To lean on you so hard, so long!

-- Donald Justice
 

Shakespeare on Making a Good End

I've said farewell to 2011. The old year has passed and I'm glad to see it go.  We must let it go well... that's why we party.  It isn't so much to greet the New Year as to make a good end of the old one.


"Oh, that a man might know the end of this day’s business ere it come! But it sufficeth that the day will end, and then the end will be known. I don’t know if we’ll meet again. Therefore, accept my everlasting farewell. Forever and forever, farewell! If we meet again, then we’ll smile. If not, then this parting was well made." -- William Shakespeare

Dorothy Sayers' Wisdom

"None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience."

"The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it."

"A human being must have an occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance in the world."

"Death seems to provide the mind of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject."

"As I grow older and older, and totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less who goes to bed with whom.



Related reading:  Dorothy Sayers The Lost Tools of Learning; Dorothy Sayers The Final Redemption of Cats

Carl Sandburg on Happiness

This new year I intend to be content with the simplier things in life.  I thought this poem by Carl Sandburg captured the idea.



HAPPINESS


I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell

me what is happiness.

And I went to famous executives who boss the work of

thousands of men.

They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though

I was trying to fool with them

And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along

the Desplaines river

And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with

their women and children and a keg of beer and an

accordion.

--Carl Sandburg