50 Shades of Week: Feb. 5 – 11, 2017

‘It’s OK for something just to be beautiful, to look nice & feel nice or sound nice & for that to make you feel good. It can be frivolous or silly & not be less for that.

‘Beauty is its own sort of utility.’

  1. And he’s inside me, quickly filling me.
  2. All pale blue lace and finery.
  3. ‘Why did you want to know if he was gay?’
  4. I stand immobilized at the entrance of the room, paralyzed by his beauty and the sweet anticipation of what’s to come.
  5. How can he have this effect on me, even in this crowded tent?
  6. What does he mean by that?
  7. ‘I understand that you’re a keen fisherman.’

There’s something to be said for leaving a bit to the imagination

In his suicide note, rocker Kurt Cobain, quoting Neil Young, said “it’s better to burn out than fade away.” I imagine it’s nice to catch alight at all. I’d rather almost anything but fizzle out, but then whoever lived up to expectations?

I’ve always hated the 19th century Romantic poet John Keats. If he isn’t it, he’s at least in the conversation of greatest English poets. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” are really good stuff, by any measure, and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” gave us one of the handful of all time wonderful poetic lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth and all ye need know.” He died at 25 and has haunted high school students and their exams ever since.

Twenty-five! And famous forever. How could you not hate him?

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