A repeat of the first of our full meals at home (a simple recipe, brought with us, that uses little more than pasta, cannellini beans, garlic, greens) leaves plenty of time for the first performance of La Commedia (I attempt to read the Italian, as Reb gamely provides a translation to be checked against Longfellow’s own).

With 3 cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, e Paradiso) each divided into 33 canti (with an introductory one to grow on), there’s really a pretty long row ahead to hoe. Especially when you consider that between the two of us, going at full bore, we make our way through four tercets (basically, 12 lines out of 14,233 in total).

For homework, vocabulary flash cards remain to be made.  But if you stand far enough back from the alien tongue alone, there’s some mighty fine images to contemplate: dark woods, straight paths, slumber, and one’s being lost along the way in the middle of life’s journey.  Nel mezzo del cammin nostra vita.

“So you are here to live,” Pa-mel-a explains it to herself and us, when she has learned the date of our departure, while finishing a fashion transaction today.

So simple, and so precise, her words.  Not at all unlike the Movida piece of transformable clothing made in Italy by VagaMé.  Elegant and intricate, too.

Is it extravagance, or arrogance, that prompts Thoreau to add “deliberately” to the common verb of human experience (to live)?  If only to wake his neighbors!

Flipping my way through The Senses of Walden, I shall try to take up such impertinent questions in a fashion adapted for slow travel.

Despite its teetering pile, the nightstand has picked up another book.  Plenty to choose from in this holiday retreat.

Something about Anastasia told me it was different, though.  Dedication grabs the eye: “Happy birthday to U. All the best!”

What have I beheld?  Disinterest?  Boredom?  Or re-gifting?  Back track to “Early Praise for the Ringing Cedars Series”:

Bob and Ted; Carol and Alice.  No last names are ever used.  Almost as odd as the “salvation” discourse fulfilling them.

To stay with this pick?  Else to put it down at some point?  An existential choice in reading usually avoided in school.

In these days of camera phones and iBooks, it’s quite hard to picture the backlog of books (both great and small) on a retired professor’s MacBook Air.  Should I secure permission from my old roommate on 3^rd Belk, I’ll publish his magazines and hardbacks instead.  Far more neatly stacked, sharply shot, the image captured here calls out to me still.

iBook Library that I stashed away, many at the last moment, must be of interest to me of course.  How often, or in what way, I’ll be able to deliver to U a return on my investment remains to be one seen in the posts ahead.  “Quick scripts,” I can assure.  “Slow going,” yet, they may well prove to be.  Hey, ‘re: tired profs’ usually involve poor students (in the puns of Walden) that way.