If there is one thing I can promise, that I can guarantee, it is not that I can protect my other allies from the same fate as Sage, it is not that I will not lose battles in the war, it is not that there will be times that will try my determination, it is this: I am the Pauraque__ rival. And I shall be the one to watch her fall.

Once upon a time, there was a man as great as the gods_But even the great can tremble with fear.Even the great can fall

My mind held fast to that hot morning and the moment of coolness in the cabin. I could so easily re-enact every moment. Again-why had I gone back to exchange the beautiful charts at that precise moment? How many times would I, in whatever innocence, be compelled to choose the right time?

With some stories, you really can't rush things. And it's often best just to sit back and enjoy the journey for what it is.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

Some ancient oversight had nearly taken his sight, but this sad fuck was already blind inside.