Winter reading

"...One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken.  It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies.  A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity.  The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete.  It is all unbelievably complex.  Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms.  One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned.  Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid.  They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life.  If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon- to go squashed and dead back to their maker.  Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders.  In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens.  It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens.  Do not be led astray by it.  It was not written for you.  Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your faith in the honesty of a politician, believe if you will that the world is daily growing better and that good will triumph over evil, but do not read and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen.  It was not written for you."

- Sherwood Anderson, "The Egg"

Fair warning.

At least one of these actually was crushed under a wagon wheel.  RIP all.

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

– Alexander Pope, “Ode on Solitude”

Taken from http://www.brianhayes.com/