It is thus a double restoration from a double disruption .…

Strabo was an ancient Greek geographer whose life straddled the first centuries BC and AD, and this is a passage, taken totally at random, from his best-known work Geographica. (For fun, here is a map of what the world might have looked like to Strabo.) Links lead to the vocabulary tool at Perseus.

Geographica, 5.3.5

παρακινδύνως μὲν οὖν ὁρμίζονται μετέωρα ἐν τῷ σάλῳ τὰ ναυκλήρια, τὸ μέντοι λυσιτελὲς νικᾷ: καὶ γὰρ ἡ τῶν ὑπηρετικῶν σκαφῶν εὐπορία τῶν ἐκδεχομένων τὰ φορτία καὶ ἀντιφορτιζόντων ταχὺν ποιεῖ τὸν ἀπόπλουν πρὶν ἢ τοῦ ποταμοῦ ἅψασθαι, καὶ μέρους ἀποκουφισθέντος εἰσπλεῖ καὶ ἀνάγεται μέχρι τῆς Ῥώμης, σταδίους ἑκατὸν ἐνενήκοντα.

TRANSLATION (Hamilton / Falconer)

Now although it is with peril that the merchant-ships anchor far out in the surge, still, the prospect of gain prevails; and in fact the good supply of the tenders which receive the cargoes and bring back cargoes in exchange makes it possible for the ships to sail away quickly before they touch the river, or else, after being partly relieved of their cargoes, they sail into the Tiber and run inland as far as Rome, one hundred and ninety stadia.

a th sn f …………………..t below
r h e e r ………………….. ch lci i l
p a d d e …………………..I w i r i f
e f g s s ………………….. l eli k cl
n i e id h …………………..c th u t t
n n t d p …………………..i ge up r
e g h e l …………………..t on ou t
d e e s a …………………..s sps s e
c r ewli s …………………..a a n h h
ir tht i t …………………..e n dw o

ch lci i l
l eli k cl
e n dw o
I w i r i f
c th u t t
a a n h h
s sps s e
t on ou t
i ge up r
n ash wo
t below

“Having seen it all,” said Moges Alemu, 84, a factory owner who in a bygone era was Emperor Haile Selassie’s flight technician, “I can say there has never been anything as highly anticipated in this country as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.” [POST]

Dream. Helping elderly Asian Pacific couple find someone on the train. They can’t get off unless a certain person is there and I’m checking every train car for that person (including places where a person could not possibly be, such as under dropped coats and going through book shelves).

Dream. A social situation in an outdoor setting, but there is a sort of gas flare in the dream that does not seem dreamlike but real. It will go off and seem like nothing from a dream. Does no one else in the dream see this reality? (This is different from hearing a clock tower in a dream and realizing it is an alarm clock; this is more like an actor really dying onstage.)

Dylan lyrics: Union Sundown

Song of Myself, 48 “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,/ And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,/ And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, /And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero…”

Wallace, known as a stickler for correct usage, at IJ pp. 386, uses enjambment to mean simply ‘jammed in’:

This segues into an entr’acte, with continent squeezed in for world in ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ which enjambment doesn’t do the rhythm section of doo-wopping girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole new era.

That’s a good, but I don’t think technically correct, use of the word. Enjambment means the content of one line of poetry spilling into the next line of poetry. What Wallace is describing is a word with three syllables being said in the space of a word with one syllable, — which is actually kind of the opposite.

Hippocrates, 19. eng

ἐπὴν διακοπῇ ὀστέον, ἢ χονδρὸς, ἢ νεῦρον, ἢ γνάθου τὸ λεπτὸν, ἢ ἀκροποσθίη, οὔτε αὔξεται, οὔτε ξυμφύεται.

When bone, cartilage, tendon, the lower jaw or foreskin are cut off, they do not grow back or reunite.

Milky Way galaxy is a flat disk 100,000 light years or so across, but it’s also about 2,000 light years thick…

From left to right: pink rubber cat comb shaped like an upright seated cat as seen from the front (the rubber spiked back of this rubber cat to go against that of the old but living one); bottom half of it seen through a curved tumbler perhaps a fifth full of water, its transparence marred in points by drops of water clinging to its side and reflected light.

Within the refractive circle of the water surface is visible a semi-circumference of the vessel’s base.

Book, right side up, (Anne Boyer’s The Undying) with cover concealed by a book, downside up, Complete Poems of William Blake, the white of its barcode oddly salient against the dirty white or tan of its background. The spine of Blake’s Complete meets the bottom edge of Wallace Stevens’ Complete — his photograph in a suit there. That hard bound book partially covered by a sky blue paperback that contains criticism of the poems it rests on, and is upside down, splayed open, itself largely concealed beneath the closed Campaigns of Napoleon.

The dark green dust jacket of The Campaigns, with an eagle emblem on it, lifted to reveal a half inch sliver of the cover beneath, a similar dark blue sliver of Stevens’ Complete visible at the bottom edge of its pale dust jacket. The cat comb, the water glass, The Undying, and the Blake, all resting on a cat-hair-covered sweatshirt, tossed on that spot some while ago, one involuted arm of it rising in a mound of blue cloth by The Campaigns.