I have been ploughing through my Paper Desk writing cheques and notes, filing information, and constantly coming across blog ideas - clippings, tear sheets, scribbles, quotations, on and on and on (anon anon anon) - what you might call an embarrassment of riches, except right now it looks like an overwhelming load of ... stuff. So I'm going to try to do a quick summary of a few ideas I have come across. If anything triggers a response in you, then I know we are compatible, at least.

I found a line I wrote down: "ride on the tailwinds of chance". It made me think of two similar lines, both from songs: "ride on the wings of a dream" - from I don't know where. (sigh: I suppose I'll have to look it up.) And "Ride on the wheels of a dream." I know that one: it's from the musical Ragtime, based on E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime.

What is binocular vision?

What did Freud mean by "painlful unpleasure"?

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?

Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

by William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)

That's enough for tonight (it's the end of the day now). I'm going to bed.