Hanging crimes

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older
than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo, and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

--Langston Hughes

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, and nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks, I am going to listen.

--Thomas Merton

I am just about to finish a book called Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Dan gave it to me as a birthday present, and I haven't been able to stop reading it.

I also acquired Syriana recently, which is a very important work in itself. But I was watching one of the deleted scenes (that I think should have been left in the movie), and part of the conversation really caught me.

Bob is a CIA field operative who is coming to the end of his career due to changes in the poligtical climate. He just recently started working at a desk job within the agency. Fred is a slightly higher-up, asking Bob how he's finding his new job.

Fred: What do you think intelligence work is, Bob?

Bob: I think it's 2 people in a room, and one is asking a favor that's a capital crime in every country on Earth--a hanging crime.

Fred: No, Bob. It's assessing the information gathered from that favor and balancing it against all the other information from all the other favors.

Sometimes I'm afraid I miss the big picture like Bob did. As a matter of fact, I'm sure I do miss it more often than I'd like to admit. ...Hmm...yet something else I need to work on.

Roger and out.