Common themes: art, beauty, and revolution

Ulrich went on: "Every great book breathes this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was."
-Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (Part II, Chapter 84)

People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.
-James Joyce, Ulysses (Episode 9)

Waxing poetic, waning motivation

In light of today's mid-March flurries and my lack of desire to brave them, I've composed a poem:

"Snow Day? Missed Meeting"

Flurries today—curious.
Furious I was when I heard of this.
(But stealthily it became a mist
As soon as the freeze could not persist;
Cats feet came and cats feet went,
And with them went my last defense.)
Yet injuriously I demurred a tryst,
As there I lay in lazy bliss:
With eyelids closed, my heater hissed
My poor excuse for abstinence,
So that only I appeared remiss,
Left hoping not to be dismissed
—A fear of professors’ omnipotence
To punish my careless countenance.
Now only of this do my hopes consist:
Their very sweet kiss of ambivalence.
LB