It is that time of year again when exams are upon everyone happily – or not very much so - trotting along in the education system that is university. I have ploughed through what is not even a fraction of what I am supposed to be struggling through, but I think it is safe to say that we all know that feeling.
When you know everything should speed up and you are supposed to go into highly-caffeinated, sleep-deprived mode, but you fail to do so and everything just slows down. You, others, the world around you. Oodles and oodles of time, when the air is warm and comfortable and sleep lulls on the breeze like a song tinkling from a music box – so very captivating and enchanting.
If not for that calendar on my wall that stares at me with angry red numbers, I would stay in this eerie calm forever, have the hours seemlessly tick away into summer like time unmarked. The soft hum in the back of my head that I recognize as panic and stress has not yet made its way to the surface, and therein lies the harm that carries the eye of the storm.
For the life of me, I cannot concentrate; so it is to spending hours and hours of browsing whatever I can browse I turn, anything to take my mind off the impending exams. Leaping from one thing to the next, and this time I have ended up on literature. That seems to happen more often than not.
I feel quite melancholic, hence the highly dramatic content of the following snippets.
N’enquerrez de sepmaine
Où elles sont, ne de cest an
Q’à ce refrain ne vous remaine
Où sont les neiges d’antan?
~
Nulla rosa est.
~
On the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
~
Et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.
~
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silenced and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crow black, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
~
It is too late now to retrieve
A fallen dream, too late to grieve
A name unmade, but not too late
To thank the gods for what is great:
A keen-edged sword, a soldier’s heart
Is greater than a poet’s art.
And greater than a poet’s fame,
A little grave that has no name.
~
Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.
~
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
~
I am armed with more than complete steel – the justice of my quarrel.
~
And a word of courage (or rather despair) to those who feel like the stacks of books are only getting higher:
Priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre.
Pretty rough if you are an atheist like me.
