Looked up 1 King 3:9 again. Because Solomon wishes for an “understanding heart” and not long life or riches or defeat of his enemies or other desirable things, he will get an understanding heart as well as those desirable things he did not name. Echoes of Job who, asserting no claims to good fortune, has his good fortunes restored. You can have what you want as long as you don’t want it and you certainly better not imagine you deserve it.
“Yoknapatawpa of my room, Yoknapatawpa of my mind.” Faulkner, in a Cowley letter, expressing the wish to write everything, say everything. Cowley, in an unrelated essay, remarking how all Faulkner’s characters say what they would say not what Faulkner would — are not mouthpieces for his own ideas. Sometimes I run afowl of that in my own writing, I suspect, — saying what I think — but what I’m trying to get to is showing what I think is not what I think but depicting a Yoknapatawpa of my mind — the fictional landscape I make my decisions within.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 