| "Oddly enough, pain and unhappiness are hard to recapture. I do not mean exactly that I do not remember them -- I can, but without feeling them ... On the other hand, one day the sudden smell of lime trees brings the past back, and suddenly I remember a day spent near the lime trees, the pleasure with which I threw myself down on the ground, the smell of hot grass, and the suddenly lovely feeling of summer; a cedar tree nearby and the river beyond. ... The feeling of being at one with life. It comes back in that moment. Not only a remembered thing of the mind but the feeling itself as well."
-- Agatha Christie, An Autobiography. |
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June, 1989. The smell of musty cedar emanating from linings of trunks and from well-autographed wooden rafters, and of a carpet of pine needles being baked in the lazy afternoon sun. The sound of cicadas buzzing, winds sweeping carelessly through pines and tiny waves on the lake lapping outside, and mosquitoes bouncing against our screen windows. The feeling of the back of my neck being damp from the heat. It is rest hour at camp; all the girls in my cabin are sprawled out on their bunks, sleeping or reading letters from home. I have to go to the bathroom, which means a walk up through the trees to the bathhouse, but something in the way time hangs still in the air arrests me. I sit perfectly still on my bunk, absorbing it all, "the feeling of being at one with life." Just for a moment, every part of me feels electrically yet serenely alive. Moving will shatter that moment, propelling me into the future. Instead, I am fully in the present, along with the cicadas and the pines and the rusty golden needles. I am just being.
| "Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river! I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood ... and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and hear, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it every passing moment with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture ... But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them." Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. |
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October, 1997. It seems so easy to lose your perspective on the beauty of the ordinary. For my journal entry today, I'm just going to let my mind flow like a brook does over smooth stones, writing down the beautiful things as they come to me ... the two pink roses on our coffee table ... pale morning light on our silver car ... a Texas sunset, like no other ... a mourning doves' neck as he leans into our bird feeder ... the smell of pine needles when the sun's coming out after rain ... apples piled into a bowl ... the delicate surface of an egg half in shadow ... windchimes tinkling softly on the porch ...
| "They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. Cormack McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses |  |
January 1997.I heard this passage read aloud twice in high school. What arrested me was the description of the stars "swarming" and the "glowing orchard." It transported me immediately to that moment where two men are riding under and among them on their way to an adventure -- I could see the stars, feel the cold, sense the characters' freshness and exhilaration. The passage comes back to me now, flying over upstate New York somewhere and the stars are coming up. Seeing them from an airplane window is altogether different -- they've grown, somehow, no longer scintillating pinpoints but thick diamonds piercing the velvet of the sky, and there is no other word rolling gracefully into my mind but "swarming." I'm glued to the window, never having been so close to the stars before, or never having noticed them from a plane before, and this moment again is a gift I know I will cherish.