I have a paper due tomorrow and a viva voce. They call it an oral examination but I shall call it a viva voce because I have been accused, not unfairly, of displaying belated signs of delinquency and juvenency. I have a perverse desire to go to class and tell the teacher that I didn't write the paper because of lingering over the caput mortuum of last Spring. The bile inside me isn't worth writing about. Instead, I've copied the poet's verse.


The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?


And I shan't leave this open-ended. I will tell you what I think. I think it's all futile, all, as Auster calls it, "magnificently useless."