I woke this morning damp and cool, grateful for the blankets but conscious of the heaviness of the cotton, saturated with the wet in the air that gives the wood of my desk a dull sheen and calls the corners of my papers to crumple.
The forecast says a week of rain – well! I can’t deny happiness at the anticipation of all this gray and the way the water paints colors brighter, turns the world into one great canvas of drip and blurring color. Everything transformed and heightened – and yet brought closer, the sky coming in a bit, closing us off for moment from the yawning enomority of the universe.
Last week was beautiful too – a different beauty, the more glorious kind, who needs the security of cloud when you have nothing to hide, to hide from. Tapped out the following on my phone while walking to the subway, dodging automobiles and park slopians on their way to work:
“Such a beautiful day that it’s a little sad – the superlative clarity, gladness, clap of the air, the pigment pure blue backdrop to the sun-lit green of the trees (leaves just in adolescence, imagine that, to begin again each spring) implies all the other days that aren’t so – even when they’re close to perfect – but perhaps it’s muggy or the clouds impinge a little casting the light a sick gray or it’s a bit too warm and the forehead grows moist or the temperature is just so but rain is on its way -
As beautiful as it was, maybe, when WWI began, as told by Stefan Zweig.*
It’s a little sad, but not very – and anyway that sadness anchors the beauty in reality – it’s not a drunken beauty, it’s not heady or soporific or floating. It is brief but it is very real and so I gulp.”
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*And indeed, I have the Zweig passage referred to en route stowed away in the dusty archives of my gmail drafts, a little jewel waiting and winking in the darkness, to reach the light, gleaming (as part 2 to the blog post I wrote now nearly a year and a half ago) – Zweig on the beginning of the Great War, and the terribly incongruity of the beauty of the summer & the doom, as he says, of Europe’s first implosion. Funny – you know, now that I think of it – I heard again and again on the Thursday Obama came down to the World Trade Center to lay a wreathe and hug the widows – I heard the radio and tv announcers say – a day of such crystalline beauty, it has us all thinking of the day itself of 9/11, our 1 (one) day of war, when even though the sun shone through the September trees dappled onto my driveway with my father home too early from work, even though the sun shone bright in the construction paper blue sky, it felt like the sky had been stripped away, vanished, and there was no gravity, no security at all.
The summer of 1914 would have been memorable for us even without the doom which it spread over the European earth. I had rarely experienced one more luxuriant, more beautiful and, I am tempted to say, more summery. Throughout the days and nights the heavens were a silky blue, the air soft yet not sultry, the meadows fragrant and warm, the forests dark and profuse in their tender green; even today, when I use the word summer, I think involuntarily of those radiant July days which I spent in Baden near Vienna. In order that I might concentrate on my work I had retired for the month of July to this small romantic town where Beethoven loved to spend his summer holidays, planning to pass the remainder of the season with my honored friend Verhaeren in his little country house in Belgium. In Baden one does not have to leave the city to enjoy the country. The lovely, hilly forest insinuates itself between the low Biedermeier houses which have retained the simplicity and the charm of the Beethoven period. At all the cafes and resturants one sat in the open and could mingle at the pleasure with the light-hearted visitors who strolled about the Kurpark, or slip into a solitary path.
Already on the even of that twenty-ninth of June, which Catholic Austria celebrates as the feastday of Saints Peter and Paul, many guests had arrived from Vienna. In light summer dress, gay and carefree, the crowds moved about to the music in the park. The day was mild; a cloudless sky lay over broad chestnut trees; it was a day made be to be happy. The vacation days would soon set in for the people and children, and on this holiday they anticipated the entire summer, with its fresh air, its lush green, and the forgetting of all daily cares. I was sitting at some distance from the crowd in teh park, reading a book – I still remember that it was Merejkovsky’s Tolstoy and Dostioevsky – and I read with interest and attention. Nevertheless, I was simulatenouusly aware of the wind in the trees, the chirping of the birds, and the music which was wafted toward me from the park. I heard the meoldies distinctly without being disturbed by them, for our ear is so capable of adapting itself that a continuous din, or the noise of a street or the rippling of a book adjusts itself completely to our consciousness, and it is only an unexpected halt in the rhythm that startles us into listening.
And so it was that I suddenly stopped reading when the music broke off abruptly, I did not know what piece the band was playing. I noticed only that the music had broken off. Instinctively I looked up from my book. The crowd which strolled through the trees as a single, light, moving mass, also seemed to have undergone a change; it, too, had suddenly come to a halt. Something must have happened. I got up and saw that the musicians had left their pavilion. This too was strange, for the park concert usually lasted for an hour or more. What could have caused this brusque conclusion? Coming closer I noticed that the people had crowded excitedly around the bandstand because of an announcement which had evidently just been put up. It was, as I soon learned, the text of a telegram announcing that his Imperial Majesty, the successor to the crown, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, who had gone to the maneuvers in Bosnia, had fallen victims of a political assassination there.
More and more people pressed toward the placard; the unexpected news was passed on from one to the other. But to be honest there was no particular shock or dismay to be seen on their faces, for the heir-apparent was not at all well-liked. From the very earliest days of my youth I can recall another day … [reminiscence about the death of the emperor] My almost mystic premonition that some misfortune would come from this man with his bulldog neck and his cold, staring eyes, was by no means a personal one but shared by the entire nation; and so the news of his murder aroused no profound sympathy. Two hours later signs of genuine mourning were no longer to be seen. The throngs laughed and chattered and as the evening advanced music was resumed at public resorts.
Posted in Lens, Words
