Saturday, December 18, 2021

A Fairly Accurate Prediction

I woke up late this morning and turned over and looked at a bookshelf near the bed. My eye was drawn to THE CANTOS of Ezra Pound. I lay there thinking, huh, I never read that, and I'm getting old, and I'll probably never read it. I guess that's what got me out of bed. I went over and picked up the book and looked at it, thinking some more about how I'm old and will never read it. "Well, let's see what you've got for me today," I said aloud, and opened to random page, and saw a line about "the bearded owl making catcalls." Now we're getting to the part of the story you're going to tell your children about one day. I thought, well, well, well, have I ever "blogged" about Ezra Pound? And it turned out I did so in 2013, having read the first four or five cantos, and predicting with 100% confidence that there was an owl in this book somewhere, and further predicting (less accurately) that I would never know, because (back to being accurate again) I would never finish reading the book.