While awaiting something that will change your life one way or another, perhaps best to acquire something like Dante's 'Divine Comedy: Inferno', just in case you need a lift after the envelope and letter fall to the floor

So while I await THE letter in the post
(from the Oxford English Department
on my MSt. application
due to be decided the 19th of March)
I have done just that

Prepared to descend into the bowels
of despair
where I will be reminded
that there are far worse things
imaginable (--imagination--all in one's mind--perspective--not real--fictitious--imaginable)
to the human mind
than a decline
from Oxford

                                                                       dante alighieri

Yet I will read Inferno either way (& probably Paradiso & Purgatory too)
because I haven't yet
and because I want to swirl with Francesca da Rimini
in either swooning exuberance for seizing onto the thing in life that must be just like the taste of blood to a vampire (ie admittance into Oxford minds for another year)
or in sheer despair for being condemned to vegetarianism for the eternity a vampire cannot get out of (ie barred from what is behind the walls & skulls of Oxford past next week).

In the meantime
after my four day break from reading
I am compiling my own reading list for the remainder of this week:
1. Andre Gide's Strait is the Gate
2. Maupassant's Bel-Ami
3.  Zola's L'Assammoir
prep work for Brussels & Paris.

Three more things:
(1) I'm ready to depart for the continent (europe),
(2) though biking around Oxford's alleys aimlessly today
with my books in my basket
I realized yet again
this place stirs me, moves me, unhinges me in very charming ways
which isn't all good because (3) After giving a presentation yesterday to Naya's class
on conservation in the Rockies--on being a backcountry ranger in Glacier--and spending hours gazing at wall-size photos of our backpacking/peak-climbing/wildlife photos from over the years, I want to go home and nestle in with nature and forget all this human stuff
that is at the very heart of it
something I am not loyal to
in any way
as much as I am
(at the end of wolf article
by Chadwick
in the current issue
of National G.)
to wolves being allowed
to be.

Okay--there's a (4) Yet
without
human minds
like those you might find in Bodleian skulls roaming over books
voraciously
wolfishly
pressing at human philosophy, etc.
we may never arrive to a place
(not even talking collectively--that would be asking too much--but just a handful)
where humanism actually
finally
recedes
enough
to see what we humans
are actually capable of
when we
are being
smart animals.

grey wolf in montana

                                                                  jane goodall & friend