632 pages.

My close friend, who I deeply admire, recently mailed to me a 632 page book titled: "Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar-Readings on Courting and Marrying". I laughed when I opened it. A MASSIVE book on courting and marrying?! Really?! It's a book full of essays. Authors include Plato, Austen, Shakespeare, Franklin, Darwin, Bacon, Homer and Lewis. (To name only a few) There are sixty essays in all and I plan to read all 632 pages. It's going to be an intriguing centuries look at marraige. I'll be sure to post my random pondering and thoughts on it as I go.

Upon receiving the book I did something that I have never done before, I thumbed through the book and then opened it to the last page. Usually I am adamant about NOT reading the last page first. However, simply written on the last page was the following sonnet and once I started reading it I couldn't stop.

"No speed of wind or water rushing by

but you have speed far greater. You can climb

Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,

And back through history up the stream of time.

And you were given this swiftness, not for haste,

Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,

But in the rush of everything to waste,

That you may have the power of standing still-

Off any still or moving thing you say.

Two such as you with such a master speed

Cannot be parted nor be swept away

From one another once you are agreed

That life is only life forevermore

Together wing to wing and oar to oar."

This beautiful sonnet was written by Robert Frost on the occasion of his daughter's wedding. It concludes with a powerful and exquisite pair of images, "wing to wing" and "oar to oar". I found this pair of images blissfully refreshing. I fear my generation often pairs marriage with the necessity to "settle down". Robert Frost however uses the language of speed to show how love may quicken the life of a couple and even far exceed what each partner may have attained alone. Frost beautifully points to the possibility of rest within motion and permanence within change. I love it. I often forget that marriage is not a funeral of singleness but a birth of two lives merging.

Contemplating singleness, marriage and everything in-between,

Liz