Tuesday

7 November 2017

— heavy frost this morning, thousands of sunlit diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

Good Morning All,

Just in case you missed it at the bottom of yesterday’s Day Book, here’s a quote from Richard Jefferies, who grew up poor on a small Wiltshire (southern England) farm, wrote fiction and essays about nature, had a reputation as a nature mystic. The novelist Walter Besant wrote of his reaction to first reading Jefferies: “Why we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not.”

Here’s the quote, which is in my top 100: “It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine. I am in it as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now.”  

Now I have a question for you: When you read It is about me in the sunshine, what did it mean to you? 

Be honest now! Does about mean surrounding? Or does it mean concerning or on the topic of?

I hereby confess, I first read it in its modern, idiomatic way, as in Eternity concerns itself with wonderful me! But, in my thin defence, my ear is specifically attuned to modern parlance. And, also in my thin defence, the sentence surprised me. It did not seem to fit. I wondered how big an ego the writer must have to equate all eternity with himself.

Since Richard Jefferies was born in 1848 and did not make it past 1887, we can safely assume he meant surrounding.

Though I like both readings. After all, however many years each of us gets, that will be our eternity.

Unless we get lucky and there is something beyond the pale, some sort of heavenly eternal life as predicted by one religion or another. I’ve not ruled out the possibility, for I am much in agreement with Hamlet that: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Presumably the twenty-six church-goers in Texas have found that out, one way or the other.

But as you know, I have sworn myself off the topic of gun control, and thus will say only that I hope the U.S. Congressmen and Senators who support the legality of semi-automatic rifles will eventually spend eternity in Dante’s Seventh Circle, which is reserved for those who do violence against others.

From one topic to another, I got a cheery response from our representative in Detroit on how much he likes November. I would slip it in here for your enjoyment, but I’ve misplaced it somehow. I shall ask him to resend it for tomorrow’s natter, and then will include my November Sonnet if the penultimate word will please not keep me waiting any longer!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: