Monthly Archives: June 2017

Finishing an unsatisfying book, a struggle to get through, too close to home and too far from it all at once. Being able to set it down knowing you have given it every chance, put it down and picked it back up, put it down again, and finally that you have closed the back cover knowing (as you did from page fifty or so) that is was not offering what you sought. But that you finished it anyway. There is an undertone of genuine satisfaction in this feeling, too.

It’s hard to remember the true taste of it, afterwards. The fear is still there. A disquiet memory of being utterly caught up in the unrelenting crush of a thing neither tangible nor even fully definite. A hint of the deep pressure over the sternum, stealing breath. Dark curtains threatening the corners of vision. A welling up, a gasp, a loss of air and of hope. But the intensity of the unrelenting pile of moments are lost in the morning. The seconds, and minutes, and hours where relief refused to present itself, where avenues of escape usually followed were walled, boarded up, nailed definitively shut. The unspeakable images of deep and abiding despair grow in frequency and intensity. But in the morning there is only the whisper of the demons fleeing into the shadows cast by dawn, their grip relinquished but their long fingerling imprints still burn on skin, a grip around the arm, tendrils still reaching out from the dark edges of the morning, grasping.

The clarity of light over the river after sunset two days after the solstice, even in these southern latitudes, throws the the trees, the moored riverboats, the bridges and houses over the bluffs into sharp focus. Abandoned industrial buildings still haunting the city’s shore are backlit in the glow, sunset hues reflect off dark water and onto the flat bases of cumulous clouds to the east, eliciting a breath of disorientation. The curve of the earth suddenly seems small from this late vantage.

The water changes quickly and imperceptibly from the bright blue-grey under summer sunlight to the deep charcoal-grey of dusk, losing contrast as the light tilts up and away with the spin of the planet. Streetlights blink on, somehow bright even in the deep golden hour light still highlighting every edge, every leaf, every ripple.

In Galileo’s time, there was fierce debate about the nature of the milky way. The sky was so awash with stars, the earth so devoid of manmade light, that the strip of night sky looked to the naked eye like a single entity – one bright source and not a hundred billion individual pinpoints in the dark. Yet the character of cyclic illumination that our small, local sun provides has been consistent for every generation of humankind that has walked the surface of our world. For all our innovation, invention and progress as a species, daylight remains the exclusive purview of our star.

When I was young, I devoured books. The elementary school librarians, delighted, struggled to keep my backpack full enough before the weekend. As a teenager, still ravenous, I would take in anything printed that crossed my path. Readers Digest, Koontz and Clancy and Crichton, “age appropriate” Christian fiction that I cringe to remember now. My mother bought me a 500 page novel in anticipation of a trans-pacific flight when I was thirteen, and was furious when she discovered I’d read nearly the whole thing overnight before we left. My intake has slowed from the firehose of a child discovering story, my tastes eventually refined, the volume decreased to carefully selected volumes recommended by trusted friends, authors with track records, occasional golden discoveries from the bookshelves of others. But the last three years have been barren, the rigor of working through graduate school burning out the willingness to read anything extra, even treasured long-form journalism falling by the wayside.

The reignition has been slow. An article here, the start of a book there, a favorite chapter flipped through before bed. Fits and starts, but nothing substantial was taking hold. Until these last few weeks, when finally the hunger has become a fire in my belly. The distinctive, engrossing pleasure of a well crafted story, woven together with precision and subtlety after a too-long absence of narrative in my world has been unexpected in its intensity, and is so very, very welcome.

Every solstice, a reminder that the world circles back around. Light to dark to light. Losing balance, finding it, losing it again. What seems delicate and temporary and precarious is in fact built into the foundation of our solar orbit. Soak in the sunshine, bask in the warm summer starlight. Feel the pull of the inevitable not as gravity, but as a centrifuge, spinning, refining, coming around again.