An Echo, needed and timely

For the waste of our flesh,
For the ways of solitude,
For the weight of doubt,
For the waning of life,
Let us pray to the Lord.

That we be healed,
That we be held in Glory,
That we believe,
That we be alive,
Lord, hear our prayer.

Perpetua

As my life moves slowly in directions of maturity I find, just now, that I am hard pressed for better metaphors for this becoming than that offered by font faces. I am easing myself into a pleasant appreciation of serif-fonts, whose little wings help my weary eyes glide over the puddles of white that separate sign from sign. Perpetua is my favorite, its name ringing with constancy. It is a book-font, and books are so much more constant than all I do here. It’s a font that I don’t even have on my computer, and that lack is what will cause these words to remain Tahoma for now. (I apologize for leaving the metaphor undeveloped. Account it to indirections of maturity.)

When I began to write all this, I meant to write about silence. It should seem obvious why that topic did not lend itself to discussion. Here is the question I have posed to myself today, and to which I hope the answer will have no words:

Why do I assume to be able to interpret silence in others when I have not first understood or loved it in myself?

The Lawn Party

Today the tall sloping lawn in front of Blanchard Hall is most anything that you could find a mind for. (And most any mind that you could find a thing for.)

Robert Frost is lying propped up on his left elbow about halfway up the hill staring at the trees; on two stools T.S. Eliot is playing a game of chess with himself. Poe is hunched against a concrete memorial to a dead president with his dark umbrella open against the blue sky, and a handful of English majors with ironic tattoos are gathered around William Blake, all crying at at the beautiful things he is saying as he converses with a fir tree which he believes is an archangel.

Franz Wright is pacing in circles in a northern corner, Billy Collins is chuckling to himself as a creative writing class parades by, and C.S. Lewis is looking out from his office window high above it all with a pipe in one corner of his mouth and a half-smile in the other.

And I am there too, the unwitting subject of a poem, a plan, polemic, or pun, which is to say, less simply but all the same, that I am there too.

Hello, September sunshine. I have come, and I will be staying longer than you, probably.

[un]August thoughts, unharmonized

I can imagine a day when I will learn to flick spiders away, rather than smashing them between my thumb and forefinger. I will even learn to live at peace with the sci-fi centipede creatures that dwell in this house and, occasionally, haunt my dreams.

sock ties, independent coffee roasteries, fava beans, basmati rice, curry curry curry, goat cheese, conjugations and declensions, train tickets, a bike path, live music, Nepali church.

waiting for an email that never comes, missing the last train out of Chicago, calling certain friends over and over, slicing vegetables in a new kitchen, visiting the same paintings every time.

my place in the universe “scarlessly closing like water.”

Plenty of things exist outside of my mind, including people. It’s just so much easier for me to deal with the versions of those things that only exist in my mind. Solipsism being the ultimate realization of sloth, to say nothing of greed, pride, etc.

When we hate something fallen, it remains fallen. When we love something fallen, we love it unto redemption. This is the power of Christ in us.

When I go into department stores downtown, I look through the clothing rack, examine the colors and patterns, run my fingers across the fabrics, take things off hangers and try them on, and then put them back and buy nothing. I am so glad that I did not do this with religion.

from Wheaton, 1 month

Caribou Coffee, on a street called Front, shelters me lately from the hot stickiness that rolled into town a few mornings ago and decided to stay for the summer, apparently.

“We’ll try to gatcha some eer condetionen in here for yeh” is my best attempt to write in the flat Chicago accent of my landlord, who informed me of this lacking amenity on Monday. I assured him that I wasn’t concerned, because I wasn’t. And amn’t.

Not knowing anyone in a city gives you an excellent reason to watch people, should you be the type of person who feels that one needs a reason for that. There’s a woman on a motorcycle at this intersection that I think could beat me up. I stretch and realize that this 24-year old t-shirt has some horrible pit-stains that I’ve been showing off like this all day, if anyone was watching.

When I ride my bike home, I usually practice riding with no hands. I often think about buying ice cream from a little shop along the way, but I haven’t yet. I’ll pass the clock tower, and campus, and the train station, and then I turn up a hill, and pass the ladies standing on an empty lot, protesting the unfair labor practices of a construction company. I wave. They wave.

I don’t know what I am becoming right now. Perhaps that’s always the hardest thing to discern. I know that my Greek notebook is peerlessly organized. [Seriously, it has no peer in this respect, I feel.] I think a lot about cheese. I write everything with a fountain pen. I drive much slower than the speed limit and hardly notice. There’s an uneasiness to my tranquility that I’ve caught out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head it’s only ever a bird or a flag or an old man waiting at a train station.