A Dream within a Dream

It was my birthday yesterday.  I’ve now completed the first year of my second quarter century.  My goodness, I’m getting old!  I had a great time, so much so that I’ve still not fully recovered.  This is just a brief post to thank people for the numerous messages I got, directly, by email or on Facebook.  There are so many that it would take me at least a week to thank everyone personally.  You know how valued you all are, how important you are to me. 

I’m now twenty-six; I have at last attained the age of reason!  Not so Ana the Imp; she is only three years old, but, my goodness, what a path she has travelled in such a brief time.  I look back over past milestones with a sense of achievement.  I had something to say and I think I’ve said it reasonably well, in my own direct, caustic and inimitable fashion. 

I would like to thank all past contributors, those who have taken the time and made the effort to add their own views.  I hate censorship so I publish almost everything, agree with me or not.  In fact I really do not mind disagreement.  What I will not and cannot publish is direct attacks on myself or other contributors.  Oh, yes, I have had them aplenty, including death threats from PETA animal rights fanatics – these have come after blogs about hunting and fur.  I’ve had people denouncing to me as an imperialist, a Nazi, a fascist, a gay basher, blah de blah de blah.  One even called me an Illinois Nazi.  Illinois?  Your guess is as good as mine! 

Yes, I admit to my own prejudices – I simply can’t stand the ignorant, the stupid and the second rate.  I suppose I did these people a favour in not publishing, in that their incoherent and spluttering words said so much more about them than about me. 

It’s all been great fun.  I write because I have to and because there are things that have to be said.  I rather see myself as a Donna Quixote, tilting fruitlessly, perhaps, at the windmills of modern life, the giants of ignorance with which we are all beset.  I owe my outspokenness in large measure to my parents and grandparents, my father’s father in particular, who taught me that silence is simply not an option.  I could never have lived in places like Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany, places where silence offered the only refuge.  I speak, I write, therefore I am. 

So, on we go.  The cycles get faster; time moves inexorably forward.  I think I may very well be entering a new state of existence, that the chrysalis is set to open once more.  I was Clio the Muse, I am Ana the Imp.  Soon I may be something else altogether. 

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?