A lamp for Friday

What should I regret? I won't let you depreciate yourself - make yourself out not good enough for the best. Oh, I know how it happened! But now you shall never think of it again. No; I will not let you. That's the only way you could make me regret
anything.


I am going to stay. But on my own terms. I will be bound to you, but you shall not be bound to me.


You doubt me! No; stay. Only give me the chance to show you how different I am from what you think - how different you are, too.

Fine, one's own word for, "yar." Fine people pass through our hands, our hearts, and come back to us on Fridays in two plain, impartial ways: as exemplars of what may be found again, as exemplars of what must be found again. For we live. Our kind, our people, our life has its literature; yet earnestly we resemble every other kind, in two impartial ways: in finding strength in it, and in striving to defy it. But our literature is different from everyone else's in one phenomenal way: it was everyone else's, first. We were in it before they said we were not; we are in it in their own disuse of it. We will stay; and they will come to it to know themselves, and find us there, the same as ever.








William Dean Howells
Indian Summer
1886
New York Review Books, 2004©


L'amour de moy
France, 15th C
Alice Parker & Robert Shaw, arr.
San Francisco Chanticleer
Teldec Classics International, 1997©