Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 4

The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares

The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares

and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade.

How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits—
eggs and sausage on the grill.

I guess I can only hazard a guess which means thinking back to my own graduation in England in 1997, and extrapolate from it.

Nowadays, at age 38, if I meet somebody who’s 41, I don’t conclude that friendship is impossible between us.

In short, the thing I wanted most in the world was to be an individual. I thought that’s what my graduation signified, that I had gone from being one of the many, to one of the few.

Are the fruits of our education a sort of gift, to be circulated generously through the world, or are we to think of ourselves as pure commodity, on sale to the highest bidder?

Your situation is more acute. You have so many large, collective tasks ahead, and you know that.

Mrs. Thatcher, who was such a genius at witty aphorism, once said, “A man who beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus, can count himself a failure.”