Wanted to highlight every line. Your writing always leaves me breathless.

I need this message. I want to do so much, more than my aging body may be up for anymore, partly in my doomed attempt to hold off death forever, but partly just because I am in love with life.

Tennyson's poem "Odysseus" is about retirement, for which its hero has no appetite: Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untraveled road whose margin fades / Forever and forever when I move.

My compromise is writing, a contemplative life filled with the stimulation of vicarious and imagined experience. But I also want to travel, possibly to live a year or more in some place that is not the US, some place where poets are regarded as contributors to the world's prosperity.