Moving as Snails

I'm crawling inch-by-inch towards becoming a well-rounded person in knowledge, reading, writing, thinking. I realize now how much my foolish attitude towards schooling in high school was a serious impediment for learning, nearly truncating several avenues of thought which I'd closed off as a sort of teenage bravado. Now I'm frantically scrambling to patch this fabric of my learning that I left in tatters because I didn't respect the teachers, or the system, or the students in the class as viable competition, or just was an angsty teenager struggling through life.
It isn't just art history, but journalism, short story writing, poetry, chemistry, certain regions of history, music, plant physiology - I'm worlds behind in numerous areas of knowledge that I should have gleaned naturally, but ignored because I was too independent, too much of a self-deemed autodidact. I was good, too, but only persistent in particular areas, and ignorant of so many others. Smart, but naive, clever, but ignorant.

I read thirty pages of The Story of Art, and I realize that even when I finish this book, I still will only understand the margins, the barest patina of dew on the landscape of art history. But each new page is crammed with learning and tidbits that fill my mind with fancy and fantastic new knowledge. Everything just seems to move so slowly.
I read forty pages of fiction, and a bunch of ee cummings poetry. I love ee cummings, but his poetry is crazy, rambunctious, absurd, playful, and esoteric as much as it is fantastic.
It's times like this where I realize that I need extra hours in my day. At least two. I'm considering trying and sleeping less every night just to get more done during the day, though I suspect I'll have more time starting mid next year than I do this year. Who couldn't use just a little more time in the day? I guess I should count my blessings in that I have no commute time.
I just want to learnlearnlearn and read, read, read and write.

Full of prayers this week:
mother - teeth pains
matthew - work angst (quit)
s - work angst (expected full years worth)
jf - death in the family
p - job situation
sicknesses about


(thanks Lisa - I think I still hear this poem in your voice)

For a Five-Year-Old
 A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

 I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed 
your closest relatives, and who purveyed 
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.
                Fleur Adcock


Moving right along, at the speed of snails.