Marginalia, no.21

I go to bed Lord Byron, and wake up bald.

~ Robert Lowell

My day, I find, charts an opposite course.  I wake in the morning a romantic genius with keenest confidence in my ability to astonish the world, but by day’s end am so brow-beaten and reduced I’m shocked to find a full crop of hair reflected in the mirror.  I brush my teeth and meditate on the happy disjunction between outward appearance and inward reality.  Days like this Fernando’s dictum (“It’s better to look good than to feel good”) is a welcome consolation.  At least I have my hair.