Serendipity

I think it wrong, or at least a waste of time, to read to confirm my prejudices. Yet when chance throws something in my way, why not enjoy it? This afternoon I took from my shelf of copy of Kipling, Auden, and Company by Randall Jarrell, and opened it at random. The second flip of the page yielded

(That a poem beginning I think continually of those who were truly great should ever have been greeted with anything but helpless embarrassment makes me ashamed of the planet on which I dwell.)

I laughed, briefly but from the belly.