Perhaps Global Warming (or cooling -who knows?) has finally caught up with us. Anyway, as I sit holed up in my apartment today wearing too many sweaters, sipping tea, and looking out at the large white flakes snuggling atop the golden leaves of autumn, I cannot help but think of this Yeats Poem (below). Slightly morbid, perhaps, but thoughts of global warming are logically filed in the folder next to "End of the World" in my brain. Calling my mother to complain about the vagaries of the New Jersey weather, she comforted me by reminding me of one snowy October day in the early 80s where school was canceled and we sledded down the hill in front of my grandparents' house. That was hours ago, though, and rather than studying for midterms, I have instead sat in the silence in the intervening hours thinking about mortality and meaning (clearly not a productive strategy: what does one Real Analysis midterm grade amount to in the scale of centuries of time and the meaning of life itself?) Strange that this Yeats poem can put such an eloquent point to the mush churning in my head...

THE SECOND COMING - W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?