Late Night Musings Quotes

I am a creature of the Fey Prepare to give your soul away My spell is passion and it is art My song can bind a human heart And if you chance to know my face My hold shall be your last embrace. I shall be thy lover... I am unlike a mortal lass From dreams of longing I have passed I came upon your lonely cries Revealed beauty to your eyes So shun the world that you have known And spend your nights within my own. I shall be thy lover... You shall be known by other men For your great works of voice and pen Yet inspiration has a cost For with me know your soul is lost I'll take your passion and your skill I'll take your young life quicker still. I shall be thy lover... Through the kisses that I give I draw from you that I will live And though you think this weakness grand The touch of death your lover's hand Your will to live has come too late Come to my arms and love this fate I shall be thy lover... I am a creature of the Fey Prepare to give your soul away My spell is passion and it is art My song can bind a human heart And if you chance to know my face My hold shall be your last embrace.

#LateNightMusings: No one dies virgin, life screws us all.

#LateNightMusings If you sext, do you get a phoner? -Buzzboss

Deal resistance a death blow and make sweet love to your art all night long. Put on your fishnet thigh highs and your patent leather stilettos and your special occasion lingerie. Seduce the hell out of your own creative soul. It’s time for an epic lap dance. Dance for your paint and canvas, for fingers tripping across keyboard, for the open arms of motherhood, for the layers of flavor in the meals you create. Wind your hips down for the click of the shutter, for the 3 a.m. bathroom poem, for the late night lesson planning

When I go musing all alone Thinking of divers things fore-known. When I build castles in the air, Void of sorrow and void of fear, Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet, Methinks the time runs very fleet. All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy. When I lie waking all alone, Recounting what I have ill done, My thoughts on me then tyrannise, Fear and sorrow me surprise, Whether I tarry still or go, Methinks the time moves very slow. All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so mad as melancholy. When to myself I act and smile, With pleasing thoughts the time beguile, By a brook side or wood so green, Unheard, unsought for, or unseen, A thousand pleasures do me bless, And crown my soul with happiness. All my joys besides are folly, None so sweet as melancholy. When I lie, sit, or walk alone, I sigh, I grieve, making great moan, In a dark grove, or irksome den, With discontents and Furies then, A thousand miseries at once Mine heavy heart and soul ensconce, All my griefs to this are jolly, None so sour as melancholy. Methinks I hear, methinks I see, Sweet music, wondrous melody, Towns, palaces, and cities fine; Here now, then there; the world is mine, Rare beauties, gallant ladies shine, Whate'er is lovely or divine. All other joys to this are folly, None so sweet as melancholy. Methinks I hear, methinks I see Ghosts, goblins, fiends; my phantasy Presents a thousand ugly shapes, Headless bears, black men, and apes, Doleful outcries, and fearful sights, My sad and dismal soul affrights. All my griefs to this are jolly, None so damn'd as melancholy. Methinks I court, methinks I kiss, Methinks I now embrace my mistress. O blessed days, O sweet content, In Paradise my time is spent. Such thoughts may still my fancy move, So may I ever be in love. All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy. When I recount love's many frights, My sighs and tears, my waking nights, My jealous fits; O mine hard fate I now repent, but 'tis too late. No torment is so bad as love, So bitter to my soul can prove. All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so harsh as melancholy. Friends and companions get you gone, 'Tis my desire to be alone; Ne'er well but when my thoughts and I Do domineer in privacy. No Gem, no treasure like to this, 'Tis my delight, my crown, my bliss. All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy. 'Tis my sole plague to be alone, I am a beast, a monster grown, I will no light nor company, I find it now my misery. The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone, Fear, discontent, and sorrows come. All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so fierce as melancholy. I'll not change life with any king, I ravisht am: can the world bring More joy, than still to laugh and smile, In pleasant toys time to beguile? Do not, O do not trouble me, So sweet content I feel and see. All my joys to this are folly, None so divine as melancholy. I'll change my state with any wretch, Thou canst from gaol or dunghill fetch; My pain's past cure, another hell, I may not in this torment dwell! Now desperate I hate my life, Lend me a halter or a knife; All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so damn'd as melancholy.

I can whistle almost the whole of the Fifth Symphony, all four movements, and with it I have solaced many a whining hour to sleep. It answers all my questions, the noble, mighty thing, it is “green pastures and still waters” to my soul. Indeed, without music I should wish to die. Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is. I find that lately more and more my fingers itch for a piano, and I shall not spend another winter without one. Last night I played for about two hours, the first time in a year, I think, and though most everything is gone enough remains to make me realize I could get it back if I had the guts. People are so dam lazy, aren’t they? Ten years I have been forgetting all I learned so lovingly about music, and just because I am a boob. All that remains is Bach. I find that I never lose Bach. I don’t know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry.

Seen Tate lately?” Colby asked carelessly. She stiffened. “No.” He looked down at her with a wry grin. “It was a boring banquet, anyway. You made all the news shows that night, and I hear one of the bigger late-night television hosts did a monologue about it!” “Go ahead,” she invited with a gesture. “Rub it in.” “I can’t help myself,” he said with an involuntary chuckle. “I believe it’s the first time in American political history that an ex-CIA agent was baptized with a tureen of crab bisque right in the middle of a televised political affair.” Colby had to work hard not to crack a smile. He sipped his coffee instead. Before he met Cecily, he couldn’t have imagined any woman doing that to tall, handsome, elegant Tate Winthrop. “Matt Holden seems to have forgiven you,” he added. She smiled wickedly. “He loved it,” she said. “Just between you and me, he thrives on publicity.” Colby’s dark eyes went to Holden. “You might also have been invited because he likes embarrassing Tate,” he mused. “Talk about natural enemies!

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start. Better late than never, of course. Do you feel up to it? It means you must still take long walks at night around your city or town, or walks in the country by day. And long walks, at any time, through bookstores and libraries.

Traditionally, in the system that Augustus inherited from the Republic, the Roman command structure was class-based. As mentioned earlier, the officer class came from the narrow aristocracy of senators and equestrians. The great armies of the Republic were commanded by senators who had attained the rank of consul, the pinnacle of their society. Their training in military science came mainly from experience: until the later second century B.C., aspiring senators were required to serve in ten campaigns before they could hold political office 49 Intellectual education was brought to Rome by the Greeks and began to take hold in the Roman aristocracy sometime in the second century B.C.; thus it is the Greek Polybius who advocates a formal training for generals in tactics, astronomy, geometry, and history.50 And in fact some basic education in astronomy and geometry-which Polybius suggests would be useful for calculating, for example, the lengths of days and nights or the height of a city wall-was normal for a Roman aristocrat of the late Republic or the Principate. Aratus' verse composition on astronomy, several times translated into Latin, was especially popular.51 But by the late Republic the law requiring military service for office was long defunct; and Roman education as described by Seneca the Elder or Quintilian was designed mainly to produce orators. The emphasis was overwhelmingly on literature and rhetoric;52 one did not take courses, for example, on "modern Parthia" or military theory. Details of grammar and rhetorical style were considered appropriate subjects for the attention of the empire's most responsible individuals; this is attested in the letters of Pliny the Younger, the musings ofAulus Gellius, and the correspondence of Fronto with Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius.53

Shaking his head at his own skittishness, he let out a sigh and dropped down beside his little girl. Immediately, she scrambled over to him as fast as her hands and knees could take her and climbed happily up into his lap. He picked her up. Her very presence was a balm to his nerves, a reassurance that purity and innocence still shone in a world that had, of late, seemed dominated by wickedness and evil. But it soon became obvious that Charlotte wanted more than just a cuddle. Eventually, she began to get restless, and Gareth had learned enough about her to recognize immediately what she wanted. "Hungry, Charlie-girl?" Raising himself to his knees, he picked up the bowl he'd excitedly prepared a few minutes ago and sat down, anticipation lighting up his face. Charlotte was beginning to eat solid food now, which delighted him beyond words because that meant he could have a hand in feeding her. Still, Juliet had looked dubious when she'd left him with the baby an hour before. Mash up her food carefully, she had instructed him, explaining the procedure with as much care as if she'd been advising an overeager two-year-old, going on and on while he'd stood there and nodded and nodded and nodded. Make sure there are no lumps in it, and don't make her eat it all if she doesn't want it. He realized his first mistake as he dug the spoon into the bowl and eagerly began to feed the baby. "Hmmm … perhaps I should have mashed up the peas or even the carrots, instead of these red beets left over from supper last night," he mused, aloud. Indeed, it soon became difficult to know who was faring worse in this new venture — his daughter, now smeared from head to toe in red beet pulp, or her papa, who had it all over his fingers and in his lap. Charlotte looked up at him and smiled through the mess. Gareth guffawed. Ah, hell. They were both laughing and having fun. They were half-way through the bowl when a loud hammering at the door nearly caused Gareth to jump out of his skin. Lucien. Scooping up the baby and holding her easily in one arm, he went to open it — and found Perry and the rest of the Den of Debauchery standing just outside. "Bloody hell!"  Perry's jaw nearly hit the floor. "What on earth have you done to her?!" Gareth looked at Charlotte and fully comprehended just what a mess the two of them had made. Huge red blotches stained the delicate skin of the baby's face. Her hands were bright red, her dress was ruined, and bits of crimson pulp clung to her chin. Oh, hell, he thought wildly, Juliet's going to kill me! He grabbed up a napkin from the table and began scrubbing at Charlotte's face, to no avail. "Damnation!" he cried, much to Perry's amusement and the guffaws of the others. "Playing papa to the hilt, are you, Gareth?" "So much for your days of debauchery!" "I say, next thing you know, he'll be changing napkins — ha, ha, ha!" "Sod off," Gareth said, realizing how much he had not missed their immaturity.

#LateNightMusings: If you sext, do you get a phoner? -Buzzboss

In the early eleventh century AD, a monk called Orderic Vitalis recorded a tale that had been told to him by a young priest, Walchelin. Returning from a sick call late at night, the priest had heard what he thought sounded like an approaching army. Taking shelter between four medlar trees he watched as the group approached, and saw to his horror that it was not a living army but a procession of the dead, all being punished for the sins they had committed while they were alive. Passing by his hiding place, Walchelin saw thieves forced to tote impossibly heavy sacks of their ill-gotten loot, a murderer whipped by demons, ‘lecherous’ women on saddles made of nails, plenty of badly behaved knights – even a segment of corrupt churchmen, which caused Orderic to muse that while men faultily judge from external appearances of goodness, God knows better.xiii This is the first attestation we have of a group of the dead parading through the night, and, according to Orderic, like all good monsters, they had a fondness for Christmastime – Walchelin stumbled across them on 1 January.

After a late-night library trip I’d call her and say, ‘Look at the moon.’ Black boys rarely speak on the poet’s muse so these twilight tropes seemed original – the moon is glowing new when seen through eyes deprived of cliché.