Still here... biding time...

"...he is, of course, absurdly young--not twenty-one--and he will be engaged to be married at twenty-three. He has no knowledge of the world; for example, he thinks that if you do not want money you can give it to friends who do. He believes in humanity because he knows a dozen decent people. He believes in women because he has loved his mother. And his friends are as young and as ignorant as himself. They are full of the wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup--let us call it the teacup--of experience, which has made men of Mr. Pembroke's type what they are. Oh, that teacup! To be taken at prayers, at friendship, at love, till we are quite sane, quite efficient, quite experienced, and quite useless to God or man. We must drink it, or we shall die. But we need not drink it always. Here is our problem and our salvation. There comes a moment--God knows when--at which we can say, 'I will experience no longer. I will create. I will be an experience.' But to do this we must be both acute and heroic. For it is not easy, after accepting six cups of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of the hostess."
~E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

For all his oft-times muddy social critiques, I cannot seem to get enough of E.M. Forster. Which is unfortunate, because if Wikipedia is to be trusted (and indubitably it is) I have now read almost everything he ever published.

This is becoming a difficult semester, due not to an abundance of work but to a complete lack of motivation. It's not that I want to be lazy, but rather that other things feel so much more important than my classwork. The people I see daily now but mayn't see again after May; the Lookout Mountain moonlight dripping through heavy fog is more enticing by far than the desk covered in work sheets that stands between tonight and graduation. Even the collection of Dostoevsky short stories that has, unopened, adorned my desk these past weeks feels more urgent than my daily reading for Science class and my looming research papers.

On the other hand, I'm in no hurry to graduate and leave this place. It's a dangerous business, going out your door. And it's almost time for my class to step out onto the road and see where it sweeps us off to.