It’s been a bad week.  The Gulf of Mexico is being poisoned on a scale almost unimaginable, the cradle of Western Civilization, Greece, threatened to bring it all down, and we have dogs and cats planning to live together – no, wait, that’s Tories and Liberal Democrats.  On a rainy May morning that might freeze over into snow, I have only one thing running through my head:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I’ve got to beware

Think it’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

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Spring has come to Saint Paul – or so we’d like to think.  One day above 60F doesn’t make a Spring, but it certainly has the snow melting, the water flowing, and the potential for a serious Mississippi flood rising.  It’s awfully early to call it for real, given the lack of a vivid green budding smell in the air, but a nose full of memories knows what is on the way.  Damp and slightly rotten has a smell of life all its own to those who let the stories flow.

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Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
– Napoleon Bonaparte

The use of quotations from famous people long gone is an easy way to dress up a blog or other writing.  It can be done as an epigram that frames the piece, as I did here, or something that inspires a work and sneaks in gradually.  More often than not it’s an appeal to authority, a claim on the mind of someone long gone who is revered one way or the other.  When it’s done well it crystallizes the point being made into an image that is memorable and mythical.  That’s what makes quotations useful.

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