Just Enough World, Just Enough Time

[Image: “Boro’d Time (We have all the Time in the World),” textile art by Lucy Portsmouth (magpieslaundry), found at Flickr.com. (Used under a Creative Commons license; click image to enlarge.)]

First, something a little different for a Friday here: a musical intro…

I’ve always liked Gustav Mahler’s “Titan” Symphony, No. 1 in D Major. The first movement drew me right in the first time I heard it, and for decades it’s been one of my favorite accompaniments during writing sessions. The title of that movement is Wie ein Naturlaut, that is, like a sound of nature. Mahler felt so strongly about how this should be played that he wrote to conductor Franz Schalk, “The introduction to the first movement sounds of nature, not music!” I love that instruction.

From whiskey river:

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it’s just wonderful. And… the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

(Douglas Adams [source])

…and:

Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

Day follows day in endless succession, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.

(Chaim Stern [source])

Not from whiskey river:

And it was like that with Colin when he first saw and heard and felt the Springtime inside the four high walls of a hidden garden. That afternoon the whole world seemed to devote itself to being perfect and radiantly beautiful and kind to one boy. Perhaps out of pure heavenly goodness the spring came and crowned everything it possibly could into that one place. More than once Dickon paused in what he was doing and stood still with a sort of growing wonder in his eyes, shaking his head softly.

“Eh! it is graidely,” he said. “I’m twelve goin’ on thirteen an’ there’s a lot o’ afternoons in thirteen years, but seems to me like I never seed one as graidely as this ‘ere.”

“Aye, it is a graidely one,” said Mary, and she sighed for mere joy. “I’ll warrant it’s the graidelest one as ever was in this world.”

“Does tha’ think,” said Colin with dreamy carefulness, “as happen it was made loike this ‘ere all o’ purpose for me?”

“My word!” cried Mary admiringly, “that there is a bit o’ good Yorkshire. Tha’rt shapin’ first-rate—that tha’ art.”

And delight reigned.

They drew the chair under the plum-tree, which was snow-white with blossoms and musical with bees. It was like a king’s canopy, a fairy king’s. There were flowering cherry-trees near and apple-trees whose buds were pink and white, and here and there one had burst open wide. Between the blossoming branches of the canopy bits of blue sky looked down like wonderful eyes.

(Frances Hodgson Burnett [source])

…and:

The Months
(excerpt)

April

In the pastel blur
of the garden,
the cherry
and redbud

shake rain
from their delicate
shoulders, as petals
of pink

dogwood
wash down the ditches
in dreamlike
rivers of color.

May

May apple, daffodil,
hyacinth, lily,
and by the front
porch steps

every billowing
shade of purple
and lavender lilac,
my mother’s favorite flower,

sweet breath drifting through
the open windows:
perfume of memory—conduit
of spring.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

Ode

People in the middle ages didn’t think they were living
Between two more important and enlightened eras;
Nor did they see themselves as the players
In act three of a tragedy in five acts.
It was not always late winter in the middle ages.
People in the middle ages were not all middle-aged
Though it is enjoyable on occasion to assume that they were.
The sun was as bright in the dark ages
As it is now—maybe a fraction brighter, in fact.

Think of the middle ages and what do you see:
Gloomy cathedrals, students dressed like monks in the rain,
Or a band of drunken pilgrims telling obscene jokes,
Or heroes embarking for the nearest wilderness come April?
Your answer will reveal yourself to yourself
But you may not know it—may choose to hide
In hazy visions of a serene and indescribable paradise.
And paradise, as we all know, may be paradise when we’re dead,
But is boredom on earth, alas.

We never think of ennui in relation to the middle ages.
Should we? Did Thomas Aquinas never get bored
Cooking up elaborate refutations of diminutive heresies?
No, and you shouldn’t either. Nor did the clerks
of Oxford tire of the sin against the Holy Ghost,
Trying to figure out what it was.

On chill September mornings when
I smoked too much the night before
And I drank too much the night before
And a sinister cough rises up
From the depths of the belly of my being,
I like to imagine living in Provence
Or even in Rheims during the middle ages.

(David Lehman [source])