A Practical Basis for Tranquillity: And No Ethics Involved

FLICKERINGS AND WAVERINGS
Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.(Words of God to Peter when He sees lovers of reading at the pearly gates.) -Virginia Woolf

Reading is a difficult and authentic pleasure; it is a pleasure that is final; it expresses a disinterestedness, an organized playfulness. Poets gains a space of pure calm, of intense and windless serenity, where their minds attempt to come to terms with their world and define their sensibility in as finely organized a way as possible, with reality flickering and wavering with every fresh perception, sensation and thought in shades of priviledged moments that create their many selves. -Virginia Woolf in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom, 1994, pp. 433-446.

I drift through the past here
to move forward through a
present that stands still for
a priviledged moment that
I finely organize through
flickers and waverings of
a many-sided, selved, self.

This global crossroad,
like a fourth century
Theodosian Rome,
is experiencing
the slow growth of a prophetic
message in the midst of a
spiritual hunger which will
magnetize masses to accept.

And this, surrounded by my
likes and dislikes, comings
and goings, weaknesses and
faults, amusements and ethics
in one entity, whole, difficult
to define in all its contradictions,
paradoxes and essential egotisms.

Ron Price
27 September 1997