pausing to look out of the window
I have little brain tonight, because I have been handling queries most of the day.
Big flakes are coming down outside, so big that I can look out of my first floor window (second floor window, for you Americans) and track a single flake all the way to the ground. The road and parts of the pavement were clear earlier, black in contrast against the paler slush and remaining snow; now they're a thin white, dusted over with new snow that's beginning to lie. They'll probably be gritted early in the morning, but the pavements will be plain white until people start trampling on them.
When I turn out the lights, there will be less darkness in my room than usual: the streetlights reflect on the snow outside, and there's a clear calmness outside, with the window glass (double glazing) between me and the falling snow.
---
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Big flakes are coming down outside, so big that I can look out of my first floor window (second floor window, for you Americans) and track a single flake all the way to the ground. The road and parts of the pavement were clear earlier, black in contrast against the paler slush and remaining snow; now they're a thin white, dusted over with new snow that's beginning to lie. They'll probably be gritted early in the morning, but the pavements will be plain white until people start trampling on them.
When I turn out the lights, there will be less darkness in my room than usual: the streetlights reflect on the snow outside, and there's a clear calmness outside, with the window glass (double glazing) between me and the falling snow.
---
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko