Of the personality as a mask;
of character as self-founded, self-founding;
and of the sacredness of the person.
Of license and exorbitance, of scheme
and fidelity; of custom and want of custom;
of dissimulation; of envy
and detraction. Of bare preservation,
of obligation to mutual love;
and of our covenants with language
contra tyrannos.
— Geoffrey Hill, Scenes From Comus
Just for the hell of it — in the midst of the clanging, tearing, brutal hell lashing out on every side, in Panjwai, in Kapisa, in Abyan, in Gaza, and countless other places across the earth — here’s a rough sketch of someone hankering to get beyond it all, to a place, somewhere out there, where the ‘ragged, chiming voices drown the echoes of the fight….’
