shoes

Gesundheit,

I almost bought a pair of red shoes today. My last pair wore out a long time ago and I've been staidly hobbling about in sedate black ones. Fret not, gentle reader, for I well know the benefits of black shoes, my classic set in particular, and would no sooner debase them than accept a slap in the face; fresh, clean, versatile, they pass as well in casual company as they do in tuxedoed formality. And yet... and yet. Here is a brief story about adventure.

Seven years ago, or maybe it's even eight now, Mr. Percival Reginaldus Tweedie, a cheerful, plump vacuum salesman on a 10-town rotation, had saved up enough money to take a break from his rounds. After consulting his oldest friends, some of whom did not like Percival at all but couldn't find the courage to terminate such a long-standing friendship, he decided to rent a kayak and ply the silken, salient waves of the Red Sea, north to south. His friends chuckled morbidly after they'd dropped him at the airport, and didn't much expect to see him again. They were starkly aware of what Percival so blissfully was not. Perils, non-exhaustively: pirates, though not likely interested in a lone kayaker, lack of water, lack of food, heat, clumsiness, sun, navigational miscalculations, sharks, jackal-headed doubt gnawing fringes of his soul in the darkness, dust storms, language barriers, solitude, Portuguese Men-of-War, the sheer massive length of what, to poor Percival, seemed a quaint oasis in an exotic locale. His friends were right, it was a foolish trip. They've never seen Mr. Tweedie since. I think he plans to keep it that way.

Tally ho,
walter

quote

Ideality
Hartley Coleridge

The vale of Tempe had in vain been fair,
Green Ida never deem’d the nurse of Jove;
Each fabled stream, beneath its covert grove,
Had idly murmur’d to the idle air;
The shaggy wolf had kept his horrid lair
In Delphi’s cell, and old Trophonius’ cave,
And the wild wailing of the Ionian wave
Had never blended with the sweet despair
Of Sappho’s death-song: if the sight inspir’d
Saw only what the visual organs show,
If heaven-born phantasy no more requir’d
Than what within the sphere of sense may grow.
The beauty to perceive of earthly things,
The mounting soul must heavenward prune her wings.