IVIV

[alice wellintown]

Ah the inhumanity!
Look at all the white men on the street
A Royal Scam!

It was a queer sort of place - a gable-ended old house, one side
palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak
corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling
than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon,
nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with
his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that
tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer - of whose
works I possess the only copy extant - "it maketh a marvellous
difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where
the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from
that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which
the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough, thought I, as this
passage occurred to my mind - old black-letter, thou reasonest well.
Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What
a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and
thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late to make any
improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and
the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there,
chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking
off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with
rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep
out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red
silken wrapper - (he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a
fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them
talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories;
give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up
to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra
than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the
line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in
order to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before
the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should
be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like
a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of
a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.



On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
> Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all''--"
>
> But first, the laundry ...
>