Above us live some curious people. Our previous upstairs neighbors had a hyperactive child who would tear through the apartment in hobnailed boots between the hours of 10PM and 5AM. I presume he spent the rest of the day’s hours sleeping it off. They also had a younger child they were fond of taking with them into the laundry room on the second floor. The laundry room on the second floor has the breakers for all the apartments in this building. There the happy child would, I have no doubt, pretend the bank of breakers were the controls of a space ship and would throw enough switches to send said space ship clean out of the galaxy.

But they left, and their replacement has been curious. What is peculiar about these people involves two things. One is a great sound of stretched rubber, as if they own a pet hippopotamus with four peg legs ending in rubber balls that is fond of pirouetting on a tile floor, you know? I wondered at one point if they had somebody—of more than copious girth—in a wheel chair up there and that was making the sound. The trouble is, if their apartment is anything like any of the rest of ours, it is carpeted and cannot really produce the sound of rubber being turned on a smooth floor at enormous pressure. It may just be the joists protesting. Maybe grandma lives with them and grandma weighs a solid 800 lbs. Interesting to speculate, but hard to tell. The second great sound is the sound of a great bed, bought in a garage sale during the reign of Asshur Banipal, no doubt, and since given to one bed-wetting child after another who has faithfully bathed the springs lo these two thousand and six hundred years without fail. Such treatment is surely the only explanation why the bed squeaks prodigiously. Nay, the sounds cannot be called squeakings but mighty cries of rust encrusted protestations and appeals. Sometimes I lie there wondering if the sounds are not echoes of the crowds calling to Ishtar in Nineveh of old, thundered pagan invocations recorded there and conveyed by this arcane technology from the Levant to the apartment above mine.

Of course, there might be another less recondite explanation. It might be the 800 lb grandma once went fishing and from the briny depths reeled up a bed on which a great treasure had become encrusted. And every night she plunges upon the bed, which she has removed to an apartment above mine because nobody would suspect a treasure there, in order to shake loose a shower of rusty, ochre flakes among which can be seen glimmering bits of gold, small jewels and silver wire which she pawns to feed the thronging, copious family whose sole pastime is to build ambulatory human pyramids—which would account for the sounds we hear.

On the way to Columbus we had a great, long fog. It cleared near Indianapolis, but we saw little of our surroundings till then. Then sunlight, and at last the view of the white-limbed sycamores so numerous in those regions.

I went walking in Sharon Woods, where some of the trees had been rendered into peeled, planted logs by blight. The woodpeckers had drilled holes clear through the top parts of the standing trunks. In those woods the fallen trees are left to join again the floor of the forest among the lingering leaf mold; there is always a feeling of disaster and aspiration. In that wood where the trees rise slender and tall I mingled the enjoyment of the place with the memories of many happy times before.

The winter is mild there, the keen wind friendly, even when it comes with snow. The wind drove the snow in a thick cloud through the air even as the water murmured in the creeks and runoffs. The wind puffed through the creaking forest and scattered the immemorial leaves. I walked alone and with great gladness in the woods and in the field which the Lord has blessed.

We walked in the cold evening beside the swollen Olentagy, its waters dark and gleaming in the last light of day. We walked in the shadows while above, high above, the last, upward shafts of sunlight showed the white branches of the sycamores decorated with dangling fruit.

I do not know if it was all the happy memories of all the happy moments I have spent in the glades and riverbanks of the Columbus Metroparks, or the mermaid suggestion of the earth color of the trunk gradually flaking away like scales to expose the white, graceful limbs high aloft; but to return to those places and see those suppliant, serene white trees made me think: it is like emigrating to Valinor.

Near the Olentangy river, below the unruly boxelders the lowest sycamores were bathed by the clouded waters that overflow the banks. The sun shone on the water and on the green grass. A tree rose from the sward, twisted as if it had all been formed by a tornado. In the forest, high above among the black boughs and the grey branches of the other straight and crooked trees were the white-limbed sycamores, reaching out to touch the trees beside them.

You can see the lordly sycamores from far away, as long as you are in the country where they grow. On the way back the sun arose and shone upon us till we passed the stone formations of Wisconsin Dells. And after that the clouds closed translucent on the rolling hills. The snow on the ground made the hills white under the crosshatching of their trees. Near the road we saw the little white beeches, the modest white trees of our Middle Earth.

And where do old sweaters go? Ought they to be hung up with dignity in an old closet where they will be eaten delicately by aristocratic moths? In such a closet the floor will be covered with buttons. Throw in the buttons you have saved, throw them in after you hang up the cardigan for the last time; do not give the buttons the pain of going through another cycle of life on another garment. It is fitting that the garment and its buttons go together into the last closet. There the last quiet years of faithful sweaters passes like the ebbing tide.

Unloved sweaters never seem to go away; they remain. Perhaps they are eaten by other moths, by common little moths, not the great moths whose wings are midnight and who pass through the depths of remote closets into worlds of eternal twilight. Those great moths are the highest moths, languid and purple. Unloved sweaters, those uncomfortable or in bad taste or just too woolly, these will never know the melancholy places where the most noble moths slowly devour the good sweaters. The fate of an unloved sweater is like the fate of the vulgar sweatshirt, cast into a ditch or passed on to a hostile relative.

But more of the moths. The royal moths who eat not only good but beloved sweaters when they have become too disreputable and are reluctantly hung up, these great moths are night’s butterflies in a world without sunlight. Grey, but tinged with purple and black swirls, some of the more rare have brown and silver swirls in their wings. When they pass under the glittering stars they bring a shadow of gladness to the dark flowers below. Mists and exhalations rise to greet them as they pass over the blue lights of the fens. They rest at last on the sheer, silver sides of mountains, bathing in the moonlight: gigantic. Such are the aristocratic moths.

Their king is a blood red moth who seldom stirs from the silver sides of the mountains. But when the moon is waning he will sail over phosphorescent seas. Then all the other moths stay behind, motionless in the still air. Then the king of the moths finds the floors of closets and feasts on the remaining buttons with a subtle sound, a gentle grinding. And all the other moths wait, for the king will not eat in any other moth’s company. As he returns the flowers do not greet him, the fens send up no mists; he goes over the still land and over phosphorescent seas to find his place again on the silver sides of the starlit mountains.

One of these days I’m going to redo all those mutable links. The lilrabbi never bothers to blog any longer, Todd’s posts are slightly less rare, and the day Ryan Martin manages to get more than a quotation up has become like a warm day in winter—you see now he’s taken to making a post out of something somebody else said on his blog? Sad.

Nothing to say anymore, I suppose. No trenchant, daily display of opinion like one wants. One can expect a certain drought in cycles, but some cycles have become exceeding elliptical. One wonders if it is due to indolence or overweening ambition. Overweening ambition can kill your posting. Take a tip from me; see the two posts under this and relax yourselves. What one wants in a blog is a paragraph or two, no more. What one wants in one’s links is a more-or-less steady flow.

For my third paragraph, I’d just like to note that the recent performance of The Messiah put on in the St. Paul Cathedral featured a very charismatic tenor who should have sung every single aria in the thing. The chap was excellent, which was unfortunate for some of his colleagues as they were shown up. I will say the soprano was good if slightly erratic. The bass was presentable and had the remarkable ability to sing as if his voice were coming from the far side of a small but considerable hill. Of the substitute alto I will say three things: her voice grew on me as the evening went along, I was still disappointed not to have had a counter-tenor instead, and I think she was under the impression that of all her natural endowments, her voice should not be alone conspicuous.

Onto my fourth, intrepid paragraph. Tonight is the last day of our writing class at the Loft Literary Center. We are going to do readings. If nothing else, this sort of class can be helpful for the audience: all the other people in your class are forced to interact with what you write and to respond to it.

Are you left reading me still? Well, I am certainly grateful. Here in the world of unsolicited blogging we are supposed to be grateful that anybody reads us and we are supposed to apologize for not blogging as if we owed it to the world, if custom is anything to go by. Do these strike you as contradictory notions? They strike me as contradictory notions as well.

There are at least three dissatisfactions I have with Tom Shippley’s book on Tolkien, but for all that I have found a great deal of it interesting. Near the end of the book he has a section on Leaf by Niggle. At this point in one’s reading one cringes thinking of Shippley’s tendency to be overzealous about explicit, meaningless connections (he has used the book to make many meaningful connections, but has overindulged in making connections). Yet here he does very well and suggests very much.

Tolkien got a prestigious chair very early on in his career. He got it as a result of one of two significant contributions he made to scholarship. The chair relieved him of some of the more tedious duties of university life and freed him for research and scholarship. A love for his subject and continual work therein he did not lack, but an enthusiasm for the academical world he did lack. Shippley paints a picture of Tolkein feeling a bit guilty that he’s pursuing the stuff he loves in connection to philology and writing stories rather than publishing articles and monographs. Tolkien was making the myths and doing the work of the people he studied rather than the emasculated work of a mere scholar.

Tolkien was a master in his field, so much so that he passed from being a master in that field to entering the field itself, as it were. If only more had his aspirations, rather than mere careers, what literature would be ours.

Cold tonight, great cold. This is not the season in which hobbits venture from their holes. By now any respectable hobbit has Christmas decorations and many books and provision for great Christmas cheer.

I have declared a moratorium on spending. We are not going out to eat again till Katrina gets a job. We have been very frugal for almost three weeks now, and I hate it. But so it must be. As a result of these privations we have not even gone to a book store in all that time. My list of stuff I want to get is growing all the while. Robert Alter has a new translation of the Psalms I’d like to get. In looking at a review I found out he had done a translation of the whole Pentateuch, not just Genesis. Much do I long for that volume.

I like Alter because of his notes, and his attempts at achieving good literary translations. I am not given to the consultation of commentaries, but I always consult Robert Alter. He is no Christian, and he actually goes out of his way to translate Psalms without the Christianity he believes the KJV put into it, but he is an educated and cultivated man with worthwhile insight.

Most of my book buying is spontaneous. I do not really go looking for something unless there is something pressing upon me to get it like school. I find it displeasingly predatory to find something by searching online and ordering it that way since I would rather stumble across it at a used book-store. Were I to buy by searching online, I would have no reason to go hunting in the real stores, which is the true joy.

In my future best-selling investigatory book, Jockeying for Position: The Rise and Tediously Over-prolonged Duration of Young Fundamentalism, I describe in detail the gawking admiration and less-than-intrepid posturing. My hostility toward the evil works of fundamentalism is all the while increasing, and I am contemplating, when I have time or am goaded to it or have a compelling occasion to do so, putting the thing into writing. Then will my book be born.

And now the cold, and the lights, some reading, and some cheer.

I have become jealous of my time for several reasons:

A – Successes in my writing make me eager for it and keen to it. I feel I am learning the art of re-writing better and I would not like to quit while it is going well.

B – My reading is once again in arrears. I had this happen the last time I ordered a bunch of things from the library. Now I have three books out again and another few coming and I am feeling it, especially considering all the ones I own that are getting the shelf.

1 – Culture Counts, which is for my lot in the next retreat, although a way off. If it does not get a good deal of thought it will not be any good. And I am feeling my incompetence in all matters. I have been feeling like one who speaks about things he does not know, which makes me keen to get ahead on this project so that when I discover what I’m missing, I may take steps to amend myself.

2 – J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, which I would highly recommend to any wishing to write and to any wishing to better appreciate the works of Tolkien. T. A. Shippley is a man who knoweth the thing he speaketh of. This is the book I currently hate to put down.

3 – The Man in the Moon, by James P. Blaylock. This is the book I may be compelled to return unfinished. It is the original draft of The Elfin Ship which I much enjoyed in youth. This one has not the parings down Lester Del Rey indulged. The first chapter was written in a chatty and expansive style that reminds me of The Hobbit and brings me much joy. The introduction is worthy of a glance. If you have a chance, if you can get the book and try a chapter, see what you think.

4 – Bruchko. A story of a charismatic missionary. I was lent this by a deacon. When he found out I had been in Colombia he thought I would enjoy it. And I have not found it unenjoyable for all that I am forming a dislike for the feckless main character.

C – I have to work.

D – Other drivers have taken the weather as an excuse to work their plots against me. They have conspired to eat away my precious time in more than the usual increments by driving pathetically. I take it out on them by listening to a set of lectures on Herodotus, nowadays, but I would much rather not be in a car.