Fly catchers
I have so many unfinished posts at the moment, drafts which I become less happy with the longer they remain unposted and the more I edit them. I'm unhappy with the style of this blog at the moment too. It all feels very messy.
I have lately led so unsettled a life, and have been so desultory in my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized genus, is more than usually chaotic, or, rather, it is like a stratum of conglomerated fragments, that shows here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fern-like plant, tiny shells and mysterious nondescripts incrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry; reviews and metaphysics—all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening every-day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.
- George Eliot, September, 14, 1839, The George Eliot Letters.1
Although my mind isn't filled with Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Milton, it's certainly filled with other things "arrested and petrified and smothered" by the boredom of work and day-to-day admin. I wish I could just stop everything long enough to get my entire life in order - but that's a fallacy, isn't it? It never works!
I got this quote from the Notepad substack by Jillian Hess↩