Tonight's poem is T.S. Eliot, because I've just read a piece on concentration and distraction that quotes him. I worry about that sometimes. There are mornings when skimming and scanning becomes so compulsive that it makes my regular anxiety bubble up (like the frozen beer in our kitchen) and explode. My interest in an article wanes long before it should. One of the books on this phenomenon/moral panic that the author cites is Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'll get it so that I can prohibit my students from surfing in class.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot - extract
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy.
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

First,
eructation:a burp! Nice.
tumid: adjective 1 (of a part of the body) swollen or bulging. 2 (of language) pompous or bombastic.
Oxford Dictionary

I'm not even one of the people Eliot was talking about (although, I supposed I really am...) and I feel ashamed of my