The widening gyre
William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming is, quite simply, one of the greatest and most important poems composed in the 20th century. If you've never read it, get thee here and take it in. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. A large part of my job is to sit in my manager's office, along with the Chicano resources librarian, and talk about *waves hands at everything*. We are a salon of three. And what we were discussing yesterday is that the truly good and the truly evil are fractions of fractions of humanity. Most of us are varying degrees of fair to middling, some worse, some better, but all just trying to get along, and often repeating the same mistakes that those who came before us made. (Really, being a librarian is a fucking great job.) We often think we're better than we are, or worse than we are. We rarely assess ourselves accurately. And that is merely th...
