(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
Tonight, I’m feeling ennui, hopelessness, a sense of futility. The feeling started intensifying yesterday as I set up a new, powerful computer, and explored how well it does with video editing. I noted to myself how I was doing this in a perfunctory manner, devoid of the excited expectation I once would have had that “I’ll do amazing things with this new capability! I’ll be creative and yet precise in communicating something via this medium.” That’s not likely to happen. People don’t turn to old men for fresh new expressions.
What did “The Preacher” do when he was feeling this way? He wrote Ecclesiastes. And Robert Browning wrote “Rabbi Ben Ezra”:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Hermanito,
“…I’m feeling ennui, hopelessness, a sense of futility…” I can dig.