the powder of life dusted over it

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough

for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--

call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,

it involved living the way philosophers live,

according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?



That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a

kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.

Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom

or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought

for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,

would be affected, or more precisely, inflected

by my new attitude. I wouldn't be preachy,

or worry about children and old people, except

in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.

Instead I'd sort of let things be what they are

while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate

I thought I'd stumbled into, as a stranger

accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,

revealing a winding staircase with greenish light

somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside

and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.

At once a fragrance overwhelms him--not saffron, not lavender,

but something in between. He thinks of cushions, like the one

his uncle's Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him

quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush

is on. Not a single idea emerges from it. It's enough

to disgust you with thought. But then you remember something

William James

wrote in some book of his you never read--it was fine, it had the

fineness,

the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet

still looking

for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it

even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and

his alone.

~ from "My Philosophy of Life," John Ashbery