It’s getting tough.

The new painkiller regime has given me a new lease of conceptual, intellectual life. So I can sit at my computer and work on my grand project, which had received little attention over the last couple of months.

But it’s getting harder and harder to walk, get about, even to get up and down the stairs at home.

I’m not much of a poetry fan, but I thought this stanza from Tennyson, sent to me by a friend, captured some of the spirit of these days:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Ulysses, 1833)