Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
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Robert Frost with an Ax
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
- Robert Frost
Written in 1923, this 8-line poem in iambic tetrameter is deceivingly simple and deeply moving. Beginning with a straightforward couplet describing the seasonal change that is fall, he moves to the transience of life in the next couplet, to a tolling of the word "leaf" and the fall of humankind, and finally to posit that perhaps there is greater value in things other than gold.
I don't know, maybe he is on to something. This week, like every week in the construction business, I got paid. And that's good; at a minimum, it keeps me going for another week.
But three, perhaps more valuable, instances occurred this week as well. I found out that Diana in NoVa was ending her DKos series Books That Changed My Life. I received a note from my dear friend Betty--not a DKos member--that she found last week's MOT particularly moving. And I received a text from a writer and my friend, Jason, in Santa Fe asking whether mathematics truly reflects a natural truth or exists as an arbitrary mental construct that allows our brains to make sense of our surroundings in an internally consistent manner.
There was a moment in my youth, toward the end of a long day of trawling with my father, that I decided that one day I would weave nets of words and cast them in search of demersal truths; and while I haven't yet reached that day, I have Diana and Betty and Jason to keep me on a dead reckoning course.
To each of them, I dedicate this thin thread.
So, grab a cup of coffee and pull up a chair.
What gold have you found this week?