w i n t e r
anglaspel
"The same law that shapes the earth and the stars shapes the snow-flake."
"So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism."
Yeah, Thoreau has the uncanny ability to overstate the obvious. He also has little imagination in my opinion. He is too much of a cynic to have time for imagination. Nevertheless he was an interesting man. But I can think of plenty that are more so. Probably because I know them personally rather than through the yellowed pages of a paperback.
I think the question was, "Do you wish the world would end, the city become silent?"
Only under one condition and now that I think about it, not even then.
I was going to say only if I knew who the three people would be walking the streets of that city, but I realize I could not make due with only two other people, for of course I would have to be one of them. Then I remember that three is a very bad number for groups if that is all there is. All sorts of room for jealously, in-fighting, blurred late night vision. Naughty fatalism.
No, I don't wish the world would end. I used to wish that it would. I used to dream of getting everything I wanted that way, until I started actually caring about other people. (In a quite limited sense) Still, I care for them and I care what happens to them even if I don't even know them. A friend of a friend is close enough for me to care.
Not that I'm a huge philanthropist 'cause believe me I'm just as reclusive as I've always been, but I like knowing there are other people sharing the struggle, other people looking for that dark matter and placing the speed on stars. Just as badly as they need to do their work, they need someone like me to dream for them, with them, to look at the sky they care so much about and nod with admiration.
Teachers need students, eh?
And everyone is a student. If you can't learn something from the person next to you on the bus, or the subway, or at the bar or in court or in line, then you've lost part (a good portion I'd say) of your humanity.
Me? I've been meaning forever to write letters. One letter in particular. I keep writing and re-writing it in my mind. I keep waiting to hear something, just a peep. I keep wondering not what to say or how to say it, but how it is it gonna get there? Those thousands of miles are too easy for my words. Thoreau never had to worry about such things, not being a traveler and not having this grand tool. Nor did he apparently write letters to many friends overseas as he did not harbor that many friendships. So his words are useless here as in many other cases.
I'd take lessons from my grandmother, were she here, and ask her how she wrote all those years not knowing if her letters would ever arrive or be read. How she felt about her perfume mingling with all the others in large olive drab mail sacks, steaming on liberty ships through the vast wide open sea. Did she ever wonder if the convoy would make it? Did she worry that her ship, with her mail on it would be sunk by some U-boat in the icy Atlantic?
Did she worry the letters would be shot down before they reached Rabaul, or New Guinea on the last leg of their trip? Did she ever make herself put all her faith in one letter and not the other, for she was writing to both a brother and a husband? Both the cold, wet forests of Germany and the steaming jungles of the Pacific.
That a life, the very spark of a soul, could rely on the boost her words might provide, if only they arrived in time. They would hold luck inside in a flight suit pocket as her brother nosed over his dive bomber to take out some small target on some small island. Maybe he'd read it again, with the plane trimmed out on the way home.
They would hold warmth inside a tankers jacket in the cold surrounding Bastogne as he rolled through with the 37th the day after Christmas.
She didn't know that. Not until much later did she know what her letters did. What a letter was capable of.
And perhaps I won't know until long from now the same about mine.
goodnight 12.26.99