Topical Guide 166
Mark Dorset
Curiosity
“Come on,” she said, noiselessly, just moving her lips and beckoning with a finger. She led me from the kitchen into the dining room. She started up the carpeted stairs, tiptoeing with great care, keeping to the edge of the stairs nearest the wall. I followed her, my heart pounding, fear gathering in my throat like a cat’s fur ball. Whatever was going on up there, it was, I was certain, none of my business. To get caught even tiptoeing up the stairs like this would mean trouble, and whatever Veronica had in mind for us to do when we reached the top of the stairs was going to mean more trouble. Ah, but curiosity is a powerful force. Ignorance is so bleak a state that we are willing to risk a great deal to get out of it. Ignorance seems cold and wet and gray and foggy; knowledge seems warm and sunny and golden and clear. I followed Veronica as if she were leading me out of the darkness into the dawn.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
A poet who goes to the trouble of taking an interest in a mathematical abstrusness possesses the instinct of intellectual curiosity, and someone who possesses the instinct of intellectual curiosity surely gathers, in the course of his life’s experience, details of love and feeling superior to those which might have been gathered by someone who is only capable of taking an interest in the normal flow of life which affects him—the feeding crib of the trade and the reins of submission. One is livelier than the other at least as poet: hence the subtle relation between Gauss’ coordinates and the Amaryllis of the moment.
Fernando Pessoa, Paginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literárias, translated by Bernard McGuirk and Maria Manuel Lisboa (reprinted in A Centenary Pessoa)
Toys and Games
Embarrassment, Humiliation, Losing Face
I must describe the toy gun that I had received as a present the preceding Christmas. It was shaped like a bazooka, the antitank weapon that fired a rocket. This bazooka gun, as I called it, fired Ping-Pong balls.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
My friends and I devised a nasty little game with this bazooka gun. One player would be chosen as shooter, another as target. The target would stand up against a wall, facing the wall. The shooter would walk several paces away from the target and aim the gun at the back of the target’s head. The object, for the shooter, was to make the target flinch (cringe, shudder, or otherwise respond out of fear) between the time of the whoomp and the time that the ball struck the target’s head. … The laughs followed. It was the laughter, not the ball, that stung.
Veronica’s remark struck me like the Ping-Pong ball from the bazooka gun. … She giggled. That stung.Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
The Start of a New Year
I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve, 2021. I hope that your 2022 will be better than your 2021. I’ve made a playlist for our at-home celebration tonight. Here it is:
• Dance Theater of Harlem, “Dancing Through Harlem”
• Flashmob Carmina Burana:
• The Hot Sardines, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen”
• John Batiste and Friends Live from The Club Car:
• Groove In G | Playing For Change | Song Around The World:
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