Poem for Wednesday

From "Mont Blanc"
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,--that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.--I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears,--still, snowy, and serene--
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desart peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracts her there--how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.--Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire, envelope once this silent snow?
None can reply--all seems eternal now.
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

--------

The shortest day of the year is over and the light is coming back! I'm still sick, and I had to stay inside all day anyway because my new computer arrived...which made up for petty annoyances like having a sore throat. It's actually smaller than the old one but it has my DVD-RW! Which I have not yet tested except to transfer files off CD-ROM, I'm afraid. I only have the system about halfway configured the way I want, and am going to be behind on things for at least a week while I transfer files over and get Outlook, Photoshop, MSWord, various media programs and everything else set up the way I like them. I am terrified to Hotsync my Palm -- I'm afraid the new blank software installation will overwrite everything that's already saved on the documents SD card, and there's no "handheld overwrites desktop" option for Documents To Go.

had a much worse Yule -- she is all right now, resting after the angioplasty, but apparently the collagen plug with which they had repaired her femoral artery burst and she started hemorrhaging, which in addition to being undoubtedly terrifying was also apparently painful as hell. I talked to her roommie , not to her directly, but I know there are people here waiting for updates from one or the other of them and I don't think either of them will be online tonight though I haven't checked LJ since yesterday evening so maybe I'm wrong -- I've been too busy tampering with the computer. This is scary enough for me at a distance and I feel very helpless about it; you really need someone to advocate for you at every moment when you're in a hospital, don't you?

All other news around here is of the school-project and cats-in-boxes variety (when two big packages arrive, you can imagine the consternation it causes -- the boxes had to be jumped upon, sniffed and rubbed against before any invasion could be attempted, and then they proved to have dreaded hard styrofoam packaging rather than foam popcorn -- what a disappointment!) My most fun news item for TrekToday was about TrekPassions, a free dating site for Trekkies and other sci-fi fans. Since my husband and I started dating over a dispute about who should get to go to the press junket for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, I think this is a great idea.

Oh yeah, obligatory Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince release date squee: Squee! Now that that's out of the way, I am going to go back to worrying that Rowling will have killed off one of my two favorite characters, leaving me too bummed to write, as very nearly happened to me with the last one...


Winter solstice sunset clouds, shortly before 5 p.m., seen through trees.