By Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translated by Boris Dralyuk and Jennifer Croft
There are no boring people in this world.
Each fate is like the history of a planet.
And no two planets are alike at all.
Each is distinct — you simply can’t compare it.
If someone lived without attracting notice
and made a friend of their obscurity —
then their uniqueness was precisely this.
Their very plainness made them interesting.
Each person has a world that’s all their own.
Each of those worlds must have its finest moment
and each must have its hour of bitter torment —
and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown.
When people die, they do not die alone.
They die along with their first kiss, first combat.
They take away their first day in the snow…
All gone, all gone — there’s just no way to stop it.
There may be much that’s fated to remain,
but something — something leaves us all the same.
The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish —
it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.
People die. Their deaths can’t be reversed.
Their secret worlds won’t be traversed
again. And all that’s ever left for me to do
is cry, How can we lose you, too?
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We had rain all day Thursday, very hard at times, though it let up enough in the afternoon that while we'd been thinking about going to walk around in the mall, we managed to walk to the beach instead and had it all to ourselves with the geese, ducks, and eagles. I was working on a project most of the morning and did some reading in the afternoon, then we ate dinner early so I could get on my Thursday night chat.
We watched this week's Ghosts (cringe with Trevor's daughter), and we've been watching Twin Peaks afterward -- Richard Beymer in Oz! The pine weasel fashion show riot! Social media has been a shitshow of unprecedented proportions and the Seattle/King County votes haven't even all been tallied, so maybe tomorrow I'll read books entirely and avoid Facebook. Some of the Farrel-McWhirter farm animals on Sunday:
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