The sight I see and still enjoy is the sight of the mountains against which the old and east of Bogota reclines. I see them with the dawn, I see them in the early morning, I see them in the late afternoon and after dark I see the lights. (I mean I have good views.) The mountains are green and you can see the individual trees, but near the top the foliage wears thin and you see the patient, rising rock. There is often a grey fog along the mountains, sometimes a band of clouds white in the sunlight, and when the rain is coming, you can see it coming down the mountains. They brood and satisfy, the mountains, and on their lower slopes rises the city, the highest tower standing in the foreground, straight and slim and half as high.

* * *
Borges made me glad with a line about parapets cracked by the usury of time. I have at last been feeling a slackening of the struggle of the Spanish against me. I can read articles with clarity and ease now, I can speak without concentrating, I have acquired the bad habit of dropping my Ds like a Colombian, and Borges is becoming a familiar spirit. It is becoming a medium of my consciousness again, the Spanish.

* * *
I travel in the dark before the dawn and in the dark after sunset. There is a pleasant sense of evening to the city the early morning does not have. I am searching for evidence of something external operating on my consciousness, rather than something I supply, but without success. I hear the fowls all making melody in the morning, not the evening, and I wonder if that is part of it—they sleep all the night with open eyes, and are loud before 5AM, when the traffic is silent. There is a warmth to the city lights that even a chilly evening holds over a warmish dawn. Perhaps it is the pollution, but I think the quiet is different—these answers do not fit the question with the satisfaction of a proper plug.

Strangely, I have more energy at the end of the day and not in the morning: I have most energy at the end of my classes, around 8PM. I have never been this way in former times, only in Bogota.

We found the best Parrilla yet. It has two locations on the same street, on opposite sides and not a block apart. It is down in the disreputable section around 58th and the Avenida Caracas. Twice the price of your average parrilla, for the most part, but so far the best meat (and tender) we have found in the city, and copious (but usually meat is copious, just tough and not so copious), and actually a meal not predominant in carbohydrates. It was a great, settling meal, not far from an elaborate church that stands with the mountains in the background and the pigeons in the foreground, and deserving of great fame, like the yucca that we had with our meat.

* * *
It is a city full of curiosities, among which we were searching for an apartment. I want someone to help me who actually enjoys such searches. Of the three apartments we’ve had I found the first because I went to Minneapolis alone to find one, and I settled on the first one I could find. The other two were found by Katrina because she likes searching and I hate spending time in wordly affairs. But here Katrina can’t do it, since you have to call in Spanish. I just have to steel myself and do it without any emotions (surely the chiefest sign that an age of grace and humanity has passed is the existence of that most nefarious device so diabolically proliferate in these last days, the telephone).

* * *
Being on the cusp of a new job, being employed, makes me feel like my life is draining away. I am fighting off the feeling, but worldly affairs are dreadful. I have been among a sect of Protestants who with sincerity if not with subtleness of perception believe man was made for work. If the work of man can be distinguished from toil, if the work of man is directed toward the arts of leisure, then I can agree. But these people believe that business is blessed, that man was made to be in continual activity at least six days a week, and their ideal is not my Homo Ludens, but Homo Economicus. I am not Homo Economicus.

It is a consolation that I do not own property and that I no longer own a car, but I have a wife and cannot entirely withdraw from worldly affairs. And it is a small price to pay for a wife (notice how involved in worldly affairs the woman of Proverbs 31 is, however, and tell me there isn’t something unbiblical in the notion that the husband must support the wife). We must be in the world for what is, after all, only the time of a fleeting shadow before the sun dispels the present darkness and the day of eternity begins: when we shall rest.

* * *
So having been diligent in my studies, having been diligent in the loathsome business of looking for work, and having done some diligence in the unhappy business of looking for a place to live—which I am sure I shall not, in the end, regret—I was ready to look back on this life full of ephemeral accomplishments (other than lunch, which was a great success and filled me with much cheerfulness, among other things) and decide it was time to sit in the sunlight reading, thinking, reflecting.

* * *
I am worried that I have already spent two hundred pages of Lewis, a whole book of Eddison, a slender, negligible work on translation, and some two hundred pages of Yeats. I don’t think the Lewis is very renewable, except as a source for consultations. The Eddison is renewable and so, happily, is the Yeats which is very valuable—but then it makes me think I’ll never find things again the fortuitous way I found the Yeats. If I regret anything in coming to Colombia it is in being a person who has finds few greater pleasures (however meagerly) than those of English literature and that I am very prone to feeling on the verge of exhausting them: being here makes the fear somewhat acute.

* * *
It is like being in the world, this being in the world. And yet, as has been made obvious and perhaps some have understood, it is ridiculous to feel at all uneasy. I finished re-reading Cymbeline this afternoon in the sunlight, and I closed Shakespeare with a sense of having come around full circle. My youth no longer seemed remote and I living a posthumous life; I felt connected to it, or the memory of the places shone more real. I wonder if my sense of life in Minnesota will grow distant. Strange how the sun upon a page—as I wrote my reflections—gave me a sense of real proximity to the places of my childhood and to the afternoons reading books from the British Council later in Mexico. Why should it seem closer just because I am physically closer to the places? I’m still not there and it seems to me that one’s geographical location, short of the actual places, would not make memories seem suddenly less remote. Shakespeare preserves a sense of the vastness of the world and of the particularity of his own land: perhaps that suggested it to me, or perhaps it was the yucca.

The word “vaina” is one that has come up a lot recently, and inhabits that strange space somewhere in the realm of Spanish slang or vulgarity the which I always have a hard time penetrating. I do not know why it is, because I have no similar problems with English (other than the use of the word jackass, which apparently is forbidden to the timid persons of Iowa and the use of which got me kicked out of the internet roach motel, lo these many years ago). The word “vaina” can simply mean the sheath of a sword—or just a sheath—and proceeds, according to the Royal Academy in Madrid, from a Latin cognate the which I will not trouble to elaborate.

But here in Colombia the word means shady business deals, mostly, and is applied to all manner of things from money laundering operations to anything connected with a politician. As you can see, it is pretty useful slang, if it is slang. They also use it as an expression of incredulity, “Que va!” as if you had achieved the ultimate cash cow, which I suppose must somehow be a shady deal or at least connected with the government.

I heard it especially last night while talking to a professor of the dismal science, and I found it particularly apt on his lips. He teaches at the oldest university in Colombia and one of the oldest in Latin America. I was talking to him because a person from church knows him and for reasons I do not entirely understand is really eager to help me get a job and stay here. So here is the crazy part, the guy is going to put my resume in at said university to see if I can get a job teaching. He spent two hours preparing me for an interview with the powers there.

Que vainas, no? I expect very little to come of this, but it is worth a try and a few hours extending and translating the resume. He also explained to me that higher education in Colombia can be aptly characterized by the word vaina.

Speaking of which, I have been reaping a little crop of small successes after long attempts so that now on my fully expanded resume (in Colombia it is not a real resume unless it runs to 3 pages, I learned) includes a section of publications:

“Another World” and “October’s Showers,” poetry published in The Mythic Circle, 31 (July 2009).

“Warming up after Bogota: La Vega and Villeta,” a travel account published online at Colombia Reports (colombiareports.com), 6-29-2009.

“The Hobbit and Middle Earth,” a review essay published in The Minas Tirith Evening-Star: the Journal of the American Tolkien Society, 38:1 (Spring 2009).

“The Children of Hurin,” a review essay published in The Minas Tirith Evening-Star: the Journal of the American Tolkien Society, 37:3/4 (Autumn/Winter 2008).

“The Wind in the Gutters,” a short story forthcoming in Aoife’s Kiss, (March 2010).

How is that for vainas?