Equinox: Light in the Corner

After all these years, I still have difficulty differentiating a solstice from an equinox. I grasp the distinction, of course, but the proper word arrives only fitfully. Yet isn't it the same with east and west? It's easy to tell "left turn" from "right turn," and as you approach a freeway interchange you know which way you want to head, but a moment of panic sometimes ensues as you try to match the phrases "I-94 east" and "I-94 west" to the appropriate directions in your head.

The fall equinox arrived this year like clockwork, which it is, in so far as the solar system can easily be described as a gigantic clock. Oddly enough, the weather also proved obliging. Daily high temperatures had been in the eighties. Suddenly they dropped to the high sixties. How delightful. Pull out a few sweaters; separate the wearable jeans from the threadbare "emergency backup" jeans. Hunt down the stocking caps: the warm fleece one that look slightly ridiculous and the handsome Irish one that's sort of breezy.   

Add to these events a morning concert of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, now that the new season is underway.

Of course, the evenings grow darker. The other day we moved a floor lamp from the bedroom into the den. We have never had much light in this corner of the house, and I'm enjoying the sight of books in the bookcase nearby that I haven't seen up close in years: a coffee-table book called Tile Art, an Edward Abbey collection called Down the River, The Year of Magical Thinking, George Steiner's Grammar's of Creation.

On page three Steiner writes:

There is, I think, in the climate of spirit at the end of the twentieth century, a core-tiredness. The inward chronometry points to late afternoon in ways that are ontological—that is to say, of the core, of the fabric of being. We are, or feel ourselves, to be later-comers. The dishes are being cleared.

Steiner elaborates this theme for three-hundred-odd pages, casting his net of references widely, as usual, but drawing special insight, to judge from the index, from Dante, Shakespeare, Heidegger, Plato, and Kafka. Faced with such a topic, and such a line-up of intellectual luminaries, I'm tempted to reply with the punch-line from the classic joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto: "What you mean 'we,' white man?"

The truth is otherwise, I thnik."We" planned, prepared, and ate the meal of industrial liberalism, but neglected to clean up after ourselves .The youth of today have arrived to find that no one has cleared the dishes. The future is in their hands.

Meanwhile, I think it might be worth exploring whether the "core of being" is precisely the same as the "fabric of being," as Steiner so casually suggests. Might it not be more accurate to suggest that the fabric of being clothes the core of being? Or is this, too, a fallacy obscuring the fact that there IS NO CORE—the fabric IS the reality. But what fabric? A weave of space and time, of affections and antipathies. We're entering the world of the Pre-Socratics here, a world of ever-shifting cycles rather than beginnings and endings.

Hilary and I spent a beautiful day recently—cool and sunny—touring the seven-mile drive at Sherburne Wildlife Sanctuary. Though the bird life was meager, it nevertheless took us about two hours to complete the circuit.

There were plenty of sandhill cranes flying around and  a few feeding alongside the road, and other interesting wildlife, too. (See photo of young coyote above.) A flock of Franklin gulls flew in. You don't see those too often in the metro area.

From there we continued west on minor highways past St. Cloud to St Joseph, where we ate lunch at a New Orleans-inspired restaurant called Krewe. They called it a "jazz brunch" though I didn't hear a single  jazz-inflected passage in the music they were piping in. The food was good.

Our final stop was St. John's University, seven miles away, where we sat in the famous cathedral for a while, admiring the massive poured-concrete shapes and thinking good and hopeful thoughts about the dear people in our lives. Almost like praying.

Then we wandered the campus, including the library, where numerous books were on display. I sometimes wonder why we don't do this at home. There was an attractive first edition of Out of Africa, complete with dust jacket, in the bookcase I mentioned earlier, for example.

I always enjoy seeing young people silently studying, surrounded by books, though I never think, "Boy. I wish I was back in school."

Life is a big schoolroom. We're all in school.