Toe bone connected to the foot bone Foot bone connected to the heel bone Heel bone connected to the ankle bone Ankle bone connected to the shin bone Shin bone connected to the knee bone Knee bone connected to the thigh bone Thigh bone connected to the hip bone Hip bone connected to the back bone Back bone connected to the shoulder bone Shoulder bone connected to the neck bone Neck bone connected to the head bone Now hear the word of the Lord.

Browsing at Half-Price Books. See title on spine: The Captive Mind. Take it off shelf. By Czesław Miłosz. Faint bell rings. Open at random. See this:

"What is important is not what someone said but what he wanted to say, disguising his thought by removing a comma, inserting an 'and,' establishing this rather than another sequence in the problems discussed."

Well. THAT is a fuckofalotta truth there. The old Man Invented Language So That He Could Lie schtick. So I had another look (same page):

"Westerners, and especially Western intellectuals, suffer from a special variety of taedium vitae; their emotional and intellectual life is too dispersed. Everything they think and feel evaporates like steam in an open expanse. Freedom is a burden to them. No conclusions they arrive at are binding; it may be so, then again it may not. The result is a constant uneasiness. The happiest of them seem to be those who become Communists. They live within a wall which they batter themselves against, but which provides them with a resistance that helps them define themselves. Steam that once evaporated into the air becomes a force under pressure."

Oh. Oh my. As Jacqueline would say, "That's a hurt."

So of course I bought that book. 

Looked into this Czesław Miłosz. Found a book of correspondence with Thomas Merton, Striving Towards Being at library. Read it. Reference to Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Got it. Started reading.

"Only after Giotto had replaced by peaks and mountains the gold backgrounds of early medieval art did we become aware of the beauty of mountains."

Whoa. There's a big thought in a little package. Also That Would Be Scanned. Scanned. (So to speak. No actual scanning was incurred in the course of this allusion.)

Giotto di Bondone [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less. {{PD-1996}} – public domain in a source country on January 1, 1996 and in the U.S.

Those are some mountain peaks alright. And before?

"Early Medieval Paintings." Gold, gold, gold. God. Yep. True truth. Which nothing is truer than.

Back to Striving Towards Being. Reference to Insatiability by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Hmmm. Look him up. Library has Tropical Madness: Four Plays, The Madman and the Nun, and Other Plays, and Insatiability: A Novel in Two Parts. Order all. Might as well get  The Collected Poems, 1931-1987 by Czesław Miłosz as well, right? 

And that's how I end up reading a dozen books at a time.

Now hear the word of the Lord.