I remember taking out my wife to breakfast and ordering a glass of grapefruit juice. The glass was tall and filled with health, pure health distilled and grown and squeezed out fresh, it seemed. In Chicago in a dim restaurant where with white coats quiet and efficient Mexicans served I had a glass of orange juice and it had the taste of also being fresh squeezed. And it was health, like two eggs and bacon and hashbrowns and some toast are wholesome and nutritious health.
One wonders: what is weariness? What courses in one’s body, what is actually worn down that sends the weariness, what actual part is unrestored and signals through the all-pervading feeling of physical dejection which the mind must meet with resignation and endure? And what is weariness itself, this depletion of reserve, this unenergetic insistence and growing urgency clamoring for rest?
The only night I slept for long was Saturday night, and I do not think I fell asleep till Sunday early. After that the schedule wrestled with my body which ran contrary and neither party would relent. When you fly out you don’t arrive till early morning where you left and late morning of the next day there, six hours ahead. And when you arrive you arrive on the same day unless your flight is canceled at O’Hare. So you can sleep, but not arriving you cannot really rest.
The contrast to the weariness is the health the fruit juice symbolizes, tall and cold and redolent of Eden. In weariness is the curse of labor, the decline of death and sleep which often stands for death now sought for and denied. Sleep stands for Eden’s paradise, and wholesome health, and on this trip I also waited for the end to sleep and wake and then like Adam meet my wife.
Caleb
/ April 29, 2008Fascinating.
The Venerable Unk
/ April 29, 2008Man, just wait till you get off the farm.
Caleb
/ April 30, 2008Outside, not off. The Farm is a world, not a planet.
What is good outside the Farm?
Joel
/ April 30, 2008I would stick to off, not outside. I never heard of anybody entering the farm; I’ve always heard people say they are on the farm not inside it, usually. Perhaps they say otherwise down where you are and it is another kind of farm?
One thinks of the song: how you gonna keep them down on the farm? It would actually make the farm sound more like a prison if you said: how you gonna keep them inside the farm?
What is good? I was just making fun of you for saying you were fascinated with this account of traveling. As in, just wait till you go somewhere less bucolic.
Caleb
/ April 30, 2008“You are very funny.”
Todd Mitchell
/ May 1, 2008I like Joel. I like cats, too.
Scott
/ May 1, 2008Traveling is highly overrated, in my eccentric opinion.