Well, a time of finishings.

The New York Sun is closing down today. It was good while it lasted. I have a list of newspapers online through which I glance every day and the New York Sun was one of those. One of the writers whose criticism I’ve found awfully useful, instructive and interesting is Adam Kirsch. I’m sure he’ll have no trouble finding a job somewhere else, but it is pretty safe to say he’s no longer employed as a book critic for the New York Sun.

Another finishing is the happy and sad finishing of a good book. As my wife lingered at Half-Wit a few weeks ago I prolonged my searches and found a book of essays by Joseph Epstein. I discovered Adam Kirsch by way of the New Criterion. The first issue of the New Criterion I received came with a great essay by Epstein from which I determined that here was a writer I needed to read. So I have put away a couple of volumes of his essays—I believe he has five or so out. My favorite so far has been the one I just finished entitled Narcissus Leaves the Pool. Why do I enjoy these essays? Well, he can write very well, informally—the essays are personal essays, with insight into literature and art, into human nature—usually by way of his foibles, the nature of friendship, and all the rest.

Are there any Gentiles writing anything worthwhile?

Owen Barfield is dead. I did finish his What Coleridge Thought, at last. It was a project of August, but so difficult and uncharacteristically unyielding that it took some plodding. It is the sort of book I will have to go back to for round two once I have had a round or two at the Biographia Literaria and others of Coleridge’s writings. Still, there is a sense in which there was only one thing preoccupying Owen Barfied and one thing about which all his books are the restatement. This book is the least approachable, but still worthwhile.

We finished another visit to Duluth. It entailed much walking in Superior, WI, in neighborhoods of decent but noticeable decay, around the center of town where there is much that is old. We were in Superior because I found an internet special for a place called the Superior Inn which I do not recommend unless your only considerations are pecuniary. Ours cannot have been said to be, but for some reason my wife’s congenital frugality was hanging like a pall over the preparations, and perhaps my occasional and short-lived however intense pangs of fiscal conscience may have been in operation at the time—I am prepared to deny it. I can say we are finished with the Superior Inn.

I don’t know if this is at all certain and have the feeling it is not, but it may be the last time I attend the Old Chicago in Duluth. We had spectacularly bad service—long waiting and cold food. I was so put out I short-tipped and I am not inclined to take things out on waiters. I have had bad service elsewhere in Duluth at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon and have punished the Green Mill there by only returning once when there was such a throng at Old Chicago on a Thursday evening that the waiting could not be contemplated. The thing about Old Chicago is that it is in such an immense warehouse of a space, so uncrammed and usually with adequate service—in short, the ideal restaurant—that I do not look forward to punishing them by withholding from them my patronage. Still, I might.

We finished listening to The Silver Chair. We have found nothing makes a road trip go by like the Chronicles of Narnia. At least, I have found that. I ought to have taken two of them because the total trip was enough to listen to two. Instead I had Brahms who was very fine and to whom I am still listening. I do not think, no matter how many times I read it, I will ever stop laughing at the things Puddleglum says. It also seems to me that when it comes to ending books few end things as well as CS Lewis ended things. I will say that his remarks about the diet and meals of centaurs, perpetrated by the faun, constitute a lapse of imagination in my judgment. I think he had been enjoying Puddleglum so much that he decided he’d try a little of the same with centaurs and failed.

We have shut our windows. They have been open all September without interruption.

But I am tired of writing this and will make it another of my finishings, for now.

I have begun reading Cleanth Brook’s The Well Wrought Urn and have concluded with much pleasure the chapter on MacBeth. It contains instruction on all of life. How Shakespeare makes of a baby a symbol of the untrammeled consequence (yes, consequence not consequences though it might be that too) of the future opens the eyes at many levels.

* * *
Some of the ash have reached that stage made rare by transience at which they are evenly mingled green and gold. How quickly it goes when it begins, the changing of the leaves. The seedy and despondent look of the elms two days ago is now shown to be the encroaching burgundy left by the retreating chlorophyll.

We go north to see the sight of it. This is no season to be passed all indoors. It is the season when the air is full of leaves; when the earliest of them in places gather with that early fragrance of tea. Autumn is the season of memories because of all the senses, it seems to me, smell is most like memory and Autumn comes with all its various fragrances. I love to smell it.

Inside the apples, cinnamon, nutmeg and clove of cider.

I do remember from sixth grade how surprising when we went to go rake oak leaves in my friend’s grandmother’s yard to find how bad they smelled. It was not exactly unpleasant, just surprisingly bad, after having lain a while to molder in the rain. And yet that was also the year we went in the clear cool to have a picnic, bundled sort of, colder than at other times of my remembering, but wonderfully outside. The smell of that is one of the first things about the fall that I remember: the smell of being in the woods during that early cold. I have never again smelled the smell of those oak leaves, surprisingly, but it is with me and perhaps one day I will again.

Is not autumn the season of our valedictions and the portal to the world’s house of mourning where wisdom goes?

Already the elms have a weary and seedy look about them. The ashes hang among their green abrupt bursts of yellow, and the cottonwoods have similar bright yellow patches high above. I have noticed that the pines have suddenly sprinkled the green lawns with needles, and it makes me wonder if they molt. The oaks, the tightfisted oaks continue unperturbed and crooked. Some maples are far gone, some appear confused, some serenely colored, some completely unaffected and dense and dark—if they are maples. The river birches—trees of Brooklyn Center’s public places—now begin the dirty counterfeiting of their leaves. They have a way, their leaves, of turning meager, yellow and spotted with brown, of withering without splendor.

Shingle Creek is flowing high and mostly clear of scum. The secret fish I think are waiting in underwater ranks away north of Palmer Lake. The lawns around the creek are deep and green—it makes me think that mowing them barefoot would well stain the feet green. While the lawless cattails wither and the wild growth of wanton summer now grows frail and fails, the tamed lawns are bright with new grass and even in places show the mocking, imitation ghosts of another recent crop of dandelions.

Here we are in the midst of a life that is all ours. A life that is for every person great or small. A life in which every life has been dignified by being, pinned into existence by the love of God and given undeniably everything individually. The sun shines on us with unmitigated splendor as the year declines.

The sinking sun lighted up a sky all consequential with great clouds heading out of the west in fleets that half obscured and half disclosed the many shades of blue behind them. Later, when the sun was gone, the western sky was dappled with smaller clouds while the retrospective east was rippled with pale fringes in the assimilating darkness.

And then I saw directly overhead a star. If my desire could have overcome my gravity I would have risen swiftly and in one eternal instant, growing with the speed of the journey, been with the star and held it to look into that undying fire like a jewel, while far away my body crumpled on the sidewalk in the twilight.

I’ve been reading Faulkner.

Here is an imitation that I will call, The Road:

It ran through the torpid land like a raw wound, and he uttered innumerable cries of self-accusing and imprecatory anguish as he followed its recumbent, unavailing dust.

Here it is as doggerel:

It ran through the torpid land
like a raw and aching wound,
and he uttered his cries
like innumerable flies
self-accusing and cursing them both.
So he followed the torpid road
through the pale, unavailing dust,
low, long and anemic
altogether un-scenic,
both longing to go and loath.

* * *

I’ve also been reading this chap on poetry. Christian Wiman. I saw his book was recommended by one of the sources I consider reputable and I have found him most reliable even though he is part of the poetry publishing industry.

I have not been reading much poetry.

I’ve taken two weeks off from the intensity of accomplishment so that I might rest and prepare to teach, but now the desire for resting has been squandered on things that come up and the kinds of activities from which no human without servants can entirely escape but often amount to so little.

* * *

The New Criterion is renewed and it comes with much pleasure for me. It is one of those comfortable things, like listening to Bach, in which there is always the astonishment and never disappointment. Well, that is Bach, but not quite the NC. Still, it is close.

* * *

September has brought with it a few grey days, some rain and even pretty steady rain at times, but September has been warm with us. Not hot though, just warm and mostly dry, though it seems much of the dry grass has been renewed. Still the warm is wearing at me. Twelve hours of sun and twelve without, though, and the sun in losing its hold more. That ought to change some things.

* * *

I have been engaged in some manual labor from which I return without much in the way of insight. I suppose I would need to become familiar with it enough to do it more automatically and thus reflect on doing it, rather than just concentrating on doing it. I hope it never reaches that stage.

It is hard to know in any useful way what sort of chaps we are. At least it is hard to know enough to know exactly how to proceed. It is all very well to know oneself in the general way that humans ought to know what the human condition is. It is also well to know how one is weak and contemptible, and also, if at all possible, what things one ought to avoid as unlikely to succeed in and from which one will derive no profit. Still, there remains a certain mystery, and it does not help one to pretend to certainty in matters about which one is uncertain. To be in time is, it seems to me unavoidable, to be characterized by becoming: so we change.

We are so used to change, some of us, that we are like people who are not used to it and are not so fond of it: both of use want things to continue they way they have been. Becoming too familiar with any one place is an unfamiliar thing for me. I have been living in the Twin Cities for nine years and it is the longest I have ever remained in any one place. We have moved two times since coming, and I still do not want to own a house and find myself tied down (or regularly engaging in the pointless exercise of mowing a lawn since one is unlikely to avoid it without extra expense). Nor do I want to live frugally so as to afford a miserable, small house: that would be no satisfaction, only double and pointless self-denial.

Which brings me to what I wanted to write about. I do not make that much money but I make more than I really have any skills for. I work at a computer and I really was not even good at typing and had very little idea of how to make any profitable use of a computer when I first started working in a place that required me to compute. I have not improved that much, having little natural curiosity about computers and machines, but have improved enough where my lack of skill is not immediately noticeable. I am the sort of person naturally qualified to live in a tenement and in another age I probably would have lived in one, but have been spared and I live in a better place than one would think and with more books than I expected. In a better age I would have been born to be a servant or a slave (and probably a mediocre one at that), but I was born to a lesser age: an age not for great men but for mediocrities and lesser men. It is very gratifying. I have had for the past three years a glorious, entry-level job (I suppose it is something to my credit that I have managed to keep the same entry-level job so long) that has been gradually diminishing and vanishing.

Last Monday the job vanished under me, and by the end of the week my new direction was decided. Now I have a job that is a little bit more intellectually engaging (I have been assured by at least two people that this is a good thing, but how, I would like to know, am I going to be able to listen to recorded books, Prime Minister’s questions, sermons and lectures while working a job that requires intellectual engagement? And how productive will I be in the real pursuits I engage in after work if I have to squander the energies of my mind on a job?). Well, it was time for a change. And so decided am I on a change that the allure of having four ten-hour shifts and being away from meetings and office politics caused me to settle favorably on the notion of working from 10PM till 8AM.

This is why I started out this little essay the way I did. Long, now, have I lived the settled ways. We learn from suffering to mitigate it by avoiding things that bring suffering to pass. Going to bed early and avoiding loss of sleep is a way to mitigate a certain form of suffering. And yet it seems to me after nine years of doing this pretty constantly, that sometimes not only suffering is mitigated, but pleasures are sacrificed. At least, sometimes, valuable experiences might be foregone by such proceedings. So it is time to shake things up a little; to become, after so many years, again acquainted with the night; to be able to walk outside on a winter night at 3AM and look at the moon on the snow; to drink the midnight coffee. Who knows? I may even chance again to see the stars. I think I would enjoy that.

It will not start till I am trained, and since my level of skill is remarkably low it will probably take me three weeks or more to be trained. But after that darkness will come for the Unexamined Life. Perhaps, after all, this is the sort of chap it will turn out that I am.

September is growing long; the leaves are in their early turning—some few, confused trees have almost finished; the warmth of daylight has less purchase on the advancing cool of night. The vines, like nets are cast over the lowest limbs of trees and cover over the lower brush, aspiring high into some places where the sunlight reaches slanting in. The patient firs are filled with sun inside their shelves. We stand on the cusp of fall and on the last border of the summer.

Contentment is about that space between the departure of the past and the arrival of the future. It is always around us but sometimes seems so narrow it is hard to notice. Summer with its fruitfulness has yielded, has survived the drought and wanes with the last reek and twitter and leaves waving without vigor in clear sunlight. All the lawns are green, restored for fall which now we await with a new and disinterested longing. Already there are times when coming around a bend the path before is all strewn with leaves.

The earth beneath us whirls, giving us the sweet variety of seasons. And all we have to do is ride.

I have been in good and in high spirits for a long while. And now weariness, and turmoil and too much of musing without any clear and proper thinking.

But there are pleasures: the rain trickling down, falling, everywhere noticed though I have not had time to pause and watch it very long. The sun after the rain and the clouds in a clearing sky. The regathering clouds and the winds that are so indifferent. The spending of time in places in plain view that are seldom noticed, places of regular neglect and meager attentions such as fill up cities: dark places, quiet places, where the sun sometimes comes, the spider makes webs, the rain drips nearby, the grass has become somewhat wild and the leaves of forgotten autumns and distant trees still chuckle outside basement windows.

And why do cities where so much is concentrated make up a waste of underused and unappreciated places? These are corners, corners under stairs, with small windows, in large rooms, in shafts. Places behind unimportant doors, or with imperceptibly strange proportions, or on the outside of a building in an awkward part like an alley. We have these places even in our houses and we would have to live in spheres or maybe space ships to avoid them. But I do not think we can avoid them, which makes me wonder if perhaps we need them, at least to remind us of the sort of pauses like them that are scattered about our lives.

Nature, it seems to me, knows nothing of such places and is best at using them. And that makes me think these places exist to show us the finitude of those by whose design they exist.

Aurora Borealis appears a technical designation, devoid of life and Latin, an attempt, like putting a pin through a bug, to designate a fact. And when I read it I have only got a fact. But when I read The Northern Dawn the world is shifted and a mystery brightens in the sky, a new wonder arises and it sends through me a thrill of joy. And now I can return and read aurora borealis with some wonder, with the concept, though preferring still The Northern Dawn.

I suppose it would not be the case were I to first learn Latin, and then come across the term.

Now is the season of our sweaters. Now the long sleeve, now the more pleasant reward of the hot chocolate, now the warm tea-pot and the long, hot bath. Blue skies, cool winds, long-lasting dew on the long grass. All.

September our ninth month. The Romans seem to have gotten a hold of our months around June. They did well with July and August: good names like January and February. But then they started numbering them all wrong: September for the ninth, October for the tenth and so on through December: two months behind. I like the names of all of them still, though I feel December you could change to Yule. These are some of the best months.

With Worsdworth I went on a protracted walk. The sun came from the opposite direction and the morning was alive with all the cool of fall. I turned the pages with the pleasure of cold fingers and later I typed with the pleasure of cold fingers. Oh the pleasures of the cold.

What I noticed was the sunlight that falls all the way to the forest floor. I saw the pylons marching through the park and thought of wildernesses through which the lofty and straight power lines are carried on: ignored but not remote. The sunlight falling on the forest floor is rich and makes the gloom around it rich as the sound of early morning in the leaves. The sun falls through in pools through which the water runs clear brown with golden ripples. In the occult regions of a shady, semi-stagnant, clouded creek moves the undreaming carp, a figure vague. But when the carp reaches the clear, flowing waters and brown sunlight then one feels ones gazes on the thing designed.

When the sun warms the pavement of the paths, greater and lesser grasshoppers like to satisfy their sentience in the morning sun. So many are there in some spots that as I walk through they’re disturbed and leap away like so much bouncing debris. It provokes the reflections that it would be very satisfying to interrupt the arc of their leaping by catching with a kick the startled bug and giving it an unanticipated, greater arc to travel.

* * *
You may remember I mentioned some doomed ashes some time back. All of them have been cut down and had their stumps painted red. There is some sawdust in the grass around them, a few indentations of the ground, but very little other than the low stumps with the fresh, exposed wood sprayed red. Most are two feet in diameter, one three and the greatest one is four. It fills me with sense of loss when I realize how thick the trunk was, how long it must have taken to achieve. It is a bit uncanny how the light in which I saw them was a true, prophetic light.

These cutters-down-of-trees. Another party had set up further along my early way, was trimming cottonwoods and grinding them up to bits. An outfit from Des Moines. And not the only outfit out clamoring with their labors to disturb the silence of the woods with engines and with hammers.