This is one of my Lost Blogs, even as blogworld becomes the land of the lost. But there's a lot of good stuff here, and I want to keep it alive. So I'm posting this just so Blogger doesn't eliminate it for non-use. It apparently is being used, judging from the hundreds to many hundreds of hits (though they may all be bots, what do I know.) But mostly, I intend to use its contents, so I want them to exist. And who knows, I may start posting here again.
Actually, I can post something apropos of the 60s: something the poet W.S. Merwin said about those times in his preface to a collection of his poetry of the period (The Second Four Books of Poems):
“Wild aspiration and vertiginous despair existed not alternately but at once, and at times we may have clung to visionary hopes not so much because they were really credible as because we felt it would be not only mean-spirited but fatal to abandon them. We knew a kind of willful desperation.”
“We know that age to be utterly beyond our reach now, irretrievably past, a period whose distance we already feel as though it had stretched into centuries, and yet it appears to us to be not only recent but present, still with us not as a memory but as a part of our unfinished days, a ground or backdrop before which we live. It could be said that we are haunted by it, which would suggest that that time was not done with in us, that what we saw and felt then is still part of our incompleteness and our choices.”
(Photo: Merwin in the 60s by James Baker Hall)
