Compelling passages, notable quotables, bon mots, disjecta, ephemera, and miscellany.

A. I meet you in an evil time.

B. The evil bells

Put out of our heads, I think, the thought of everything else.

A. The jaded calendar revolves,

Its nuts need oil, carbon chokes the valves,

The excess sugar of a diabetic culture

Rotting the nerve of life and literature;

Therefore when we bring out the old tinsel and frills

To announce that Christ is born among the barbarous hills

I turn to you whom a morose routine

Saves from the mad vertigo of being what has been.

— “An eclogue for Christmas” by Louis MacNiece. December, 1933.

From The Collected Poems of Louis MacNiece (Faber and Faber, 1966, 1979), edited by E.R. Dodds.