Two small, fidgety brown birds and a cardinal are sitting on the porch railing outside my office window, no doubt attracted by the little bird feeder Ethan and I put out a couple months ago.
Suffering from a weird case of writer's block—or, more aptly, constipation (Michael Chabon's Grady Tripp called it "midnight disease")—I'm grasping at straws, so the birds reminded me of an essay Virginia Woolf wrote about a moth in the window by her writing desk.
It starts plainly enough, albeit with some lovely turns of phrase...
"Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us"...
but goes on to eloquently plumb the depths of life and death.
As for me, my musings on the birds outside my window pretty much stopped at death when I realized that, with two cats in residence, our bird feeder amounts to little more than bait.
2 comments:
Yes, sort of like the customer getting to observe and then pick the choice lobsters from the tank.
Haha, I knew by this entry title posted by Blogher in my side bar - the post had to be yours! Love it!
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