Fencing Bear at Prayer

I have just over an hour before I need to get ready to go to fencing.  I'm tired after walking the Dragon Baby home in the wind and the snow and I could really use a bit of time to eat and maybe read a bit more of David Bentley Hart .  But I also want to write because I know that I won't have another chance like this until Thursday at the earliest, and then only if I take this same hour or so between getting home from work and getting in the car to drive to my club.  It would be so much easier just to take my cup of tea, open my iPad, and read, rather than trying to marshal some of the thoughts swirling around in my head into some order.  But then I won't have written on my blog in nearly a week.  Should I really squander this opportunity to write just because I'm tired? Of course, part of the problem, as always , is that I have plenty to say, I just don't know whether I should say it.  Or, perhaps more accurately, I am worried that I can't find a way of ...

"All human beings tell their life-stories to themselves, selecting and reinforcing certain memories, casting others into oblivion.  All human beings are interested in causation.  'Because I had a good Latin teacher, who caught my mind with incantatory grammar, I became a theologian, and because I chose Latin, I put aside the sciences of earth, flesh, and space.'  All human beings are interested in pure coincidence, which can act in life as surely as causation, and appear to resemble that, as though both were equally the effects of a divine putting-on.  Most of us know the flutter of the heart which comes when, out of a whole library, we put a random hand on the one necessary book , and--unerringly we should say, but what does that mean ?--open it, at the one necessary page .  In the Arabian Nights , it has been said, a man has his Destiny written on his forehead, and his character, his nature, is that Destiny and nothing else." --A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman ...

I went to practice last night at my coach's new club .  Everyone was so welcoming, it felt, indeed, like coming home, even though I had never been there before.  It's been a hard winter, so much to live through.  My eyes are still healing , but I can see well enough to drive.  My sinuses seem to be cleared up and I've gotten over the worst of the Levaquin .  My whole body feels like it has been decluttered, just like our home .  And then my new iPad showed up yesterday, so now I can take pictures of my family and friends. It feels like I should have so much to write about, so many things coming together all at once, but I'm struggling here.  Partly it is the after-effects of last night's insomnia: my coach's new club is a fair old distance away, which is going to require me to take a whole new attitude towards (gasp!) driving on the freeway , so when I got there, I wanted to fence as long as I could.  I didn't get home until nearly 11pm last nig...

"Thus you see, sir, these people [the Turks] are not so unpolished as we [English] represent them. 'Tis true their magnificence is of a different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion they have a right notion of life; while they consume it in music, gardens, wine and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics or studying some science to which we can never attain, or if we do, cannot persuade people to set that value upon it we do ourselves. "'Tis certain what we fell [ sic ] and see is properly (if anything is properly) our won, but the good of fame, the folly of praise, hardly purchased, and when obtained, poor recompense for loss of time and health! We die, or grow old and decrepit before we can reap the fruit of our labours. Considering what short lived, weak animals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure? "I dare not pursue this then; perhaps I have alread...

My sister says that what matters to me is to win. In her words: "I have an older sister who is by nature super competitive, always needs to 'win' (you can imagine how frustrated she is).... She's in a zero-sum game in her head--she either wins or loses.... And dammit, she's going to win." In fencing. In my career. In love. My sister hates this. Again, in her words: "She's happy now that she thinks she won, but I guess that's what's bugging me. This living business is not a zero-sum game. You win and the goal post changes." Which is something I told her I'd thought about (the goal posts moving), but never mind. In her view, winning itself is a distraction from "real" life; the point is the process, not the goal. Which, again, I can totally get around. But, dammit, there needs to be a goal, a vision, something worth fighting for, right? Something that actually matters so that you get up willing to face the day. No...