Why now?

My father asks which roads led to Yeats. "The Gentleman of Galway," he calls Yeats.

It came about through reading The New Yorker and The Economist.

Every so often I get curious about how people beyond the west coast and people beyond the USA view the world.. I will pick up a copy of The Economist, which is predisposed favorably towards captains of industry, and a copy of The New Yorker, where they are not. Afterwards, enlightened depression usually makes me feel that I don't need to do that again for a while.

I read James Surowiecke in the New Yorker, who wrote:

"But for now we are stuck in a Yeatsian market: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Let's hope the center can hold."

I read that, and thought those words applicable to a lot more than economic markets just now. This led to a reacquaintance with the poem, which led to its posting.

William Butler Yeats

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?