Tuesday, August 29, 2000

 

2:08 a.m. Funny how the weather works. I wrote about the feeling of fall in the air last night and then later on, as if on cue, the rain started to fall. The sound was so strange and so unusual that I couldn't place it when it gently woke me up. Leaves brushing against the roof? Applause? Oh. Rain.

It hasn't rained for a few months, and it kept on raining right through the morning. It was less a rain than a fine mist that you had to enter to see, but still. The light all day long was just that -- light. No yellow yolky sun. Just the runny white of a low cloud.

And it was chilly. I'm wearing layers for the first time in a long time and I even had my little heater turned on beside my desk for a while. Good old heater. Many's the night.

Could it really be the end of the month, already? I've got an idea for a nice photo for my September front page, but I can't take it until the sun comes out again. It's actually the same scene I photographed last September, but I liked it so much I wanted to have another go at it this year. My wonderful wall of books, arranged alphabetically.

I've been sitting in front of that wall for the last few days, letting the general accomplishments of all those writers seep into my brittle bones and make my writing muscles flex again. I'm eyeball-level with Ovid and Updike and Ozick and it's just like being in class again. No TV, no internet, several hours of a different kind of thinking.

It's the linear, uninterrupted, slow development of a thought, elaborated and embroidered and pulled all the way out. Things considered, balanced, mused upon. A completely foreign way of communicating, and it's leaving this planet even as I describe it. Tenured professors notwithstanding, nobody talks this way anymore.

Only a few generations to go, ladies and germs, and the last compound modifier will have been uttered and ignored and the world will be safe for fragments and pictographs and ever more complex hand signals. Yo.

And yet, reading some of the old friends and listening to them talk in the old way is as welcome a change as the tiny delicate droplets of rain spattering the ferns outside my library window. Quiet, gentle, patient pages, slowly yellowing with age. Dusty as powdered wigs and just as stylish.

Irrelevancy is such a refuge and a comfort. Who knew?