Of course my husband has a secret life. Don't we all have a life where we are rich, or famous, or brave, or thin? In some other life I walk on the moon, sail across the ocean on a raft, and travel the world with only the clothes on my back and a journal. Maybe in another life my husband is James Bond, always sophisticated and cool, always impeccably prepared, right down to his coat and watch, for anything.
Isn't that why we read books? - to live another life for a while? And isn't that why we save the books we've read? - not so much a record of who we were, but a record of who we wanted to be?
C.K. Williams
The Dance
A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
she’s with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
moving him with such effortless grace
into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all
rhythmically solid music in this second-rate café,
that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we misbe-
lieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.
Robert Frost
Fireflies in the Garden
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.
