665-670 AD.
The work which sits at the top of Rita Mae Brown’s Reading List is a short poem, written in almost completely unintelligible Old English. Oh wait. I think I recognize one word: ‘his.’
I like this translation and original offered up by A.Z. Foreman.
Bonus: He reads the original aloud!
She wrote one. I have been looking at it for years.
The thought occurred to me: it might be time to embark upon it.
Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needs ‘a room of one’s own.’
True.
And this morning it seems that the window I’m looking through – at that idea – is more along the lines of:
We all need ‘a culture of one’s own.’
That, and this quote of F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “The Crack Up,” published in Esquire in 1936:
“…[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
These things were clouds in the blue sky of my mind this morning as I came up again upon my origin story. Big, white, puffy, brilliantly glowing ones. In a Wyoming sky.
Heart of a Cat 