Today didn’t go as I had planned at all.

Last night I noticed something stuck in my right front tire: turned out to be a screw.  No real leak, but you can’t be too careful.  So my day started with a trip to Goodyear to get that taken care of.  While my car was in the shop, I made my way back to school only to find that I had not actually signed up to be on campus.  So there went my morning pans.  Spent some time with the neighbors before going to pick up the car.  Decided to grab lunch from Teddy’s Bigger Burgers, which was a nice treat.  I found out later that Matthew Crawford’s new book had dropped, which led to a quick trip to Barnes and Noble (which is now open for business).  And tonight was spent writing a kind of reflection on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for Thursday’s class.

So what I had hoped to write today will have to wait until tomorrow.  In the waiting, though, is a quote from Gilead that I quite like but that didn’t make it into this week’s reflection.  From the letter of Reverend John Ames to his son:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.  I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that.  There is a human beauty in it.  And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.  In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.  Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.