How they must've hated Plato; he'll last forever, but you just can't write like that anymore, in this half-century, in our ornamental wounded weirdness. So you follow him, Plato, you do, until Jesus arrives—and by "arrives" I mean "suffuses the Medieval era," for then he arrives in thought, and you embrace this in your Williamsburg flannel-and-pepper-jack-turkey loft: God's well-tempered clavier, plunk-plunking before you, boiling his milk of impossible parables, mincing the incognizable word. How this attracted you. Your jaw hanging open, saliva quivering on your lip. His Word, soft as the sow belly you once stretched with a stick....

Ease now suddenly felt rigorous.

Do we have some swift un-fractioned idiom to share with the world?

No, we have Yale. Frozen, limpid Yale.

Yale Grim, Yale Grigio. Zadie Yale. Yale as a plate of rice...: a toddler's advice.

"I am so afraid of 'Paper 1: a close reading'," said Silvio Berlusconi to his paramour, Divine Angelica, a doctoral candidate in Accounting at the Yale School of Management. Silvio had enrolled in "English 310: Modern Poetry," under Professor Langdon Hammer, for a term in New Haven, trying something new and becoming nervous about it. "We have to get our teaching fellow's approval about our topic. I haven't even begun to zero in on an idea." And later, "I want to write about Pound—do you think he would've liked me?"
"You're just being stupid," was the heart-attack reply.

The sky was closed; the night was dark as Yale.

I was a grave.
Not an undertaker or a grave-digger,
A mourner or an insomniac or an insane man
Who would come every night, climb the fence and walk among them.
I was not a ghost or a grave-robber or a child's leg
Detached and six feet under.
I was only a grave,
A fillable thing for things to fall inside.
And I was unfilled until, one day,
You filled me—and let no man come between—
And from then on I remained filled (not full) by you
And all that was yours. I was your grave.
So whose grave were you?

FREUD

How is it?