The Immortality of the Little Things

With the New Year we create new expectations, new resolutions and renewed visions for a high successful and meaningful year. We hope to remember big things, often discarding "minor" moments to the dustbin of disdain. How sad.  Sometimes that half-second glimpse or spontaneous moment of reflection can resound with an imperturbable resonance whose echo emanates through our being and our soul for a long time.

I recently read a passage from the Thomas Wolfe book, Of Time and the River that captures this sentiment perfectly:

A thousand times thereafter the tone of that rich voice would return to him and reverberate in his memory with the haunting, strange and wonderful recurrence with which the "little" things of life--a face seen one time at a window, a voice that passed in darkness and was gone, the twisting of a leaf upon a bough--come back to us out of all the violence and savage chaos of the days--the "little" things that persist so strangely, vividly, and inexplicably when the more sensational and "important" events of life have been forgotten or obscured.

Enjoy a successful 2013, but take a moment to take in all the 'little' things. You would be amazed by all the wonderful things around you.

Two Lunar Writers

Thomas Wolfe

What do Thomas Wolfe (1930-1938) and Federico Garcia Lorca have in common? How about the moon? Both have used the moon and the imagery, sentiments and landscapes it evokes to supplement their some of their works. For me, we see Garcia Lorca make full use of this in his obra maestra (masterpiece) "Bodas de Sangre." He was described as a lunar poet by his biographer Ian Gibson and you would be hard pressed to dispute this claim. Lorca's allegorical style and personification in "Bodas de Sangre" give this work an energy and drive unlike any others.

I recently began to read the works of Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel is an excellent book which showcases Wolfe's superb lyrical skills. His descriptions of landscapes and people are stellar. But it is in the book I am currently reading, Of Time and the River, where he describes in magnificent and resplendent detail landscapes and people under the moon. These days people do not read books that are longer than 300 pages in length, so they are highly unlikely to attempt to read some of Wolfe's books (between 600 and 900 pages. How sad. Check out this segment from Of Time and the River:

"The moon blazed down upon the wilderness, it fell on sleeping woods, it dripped through moving leaves, it swarmed in weaving patterns in the earth, and it filled the cat's still eye with blazing yellow. The moon slept over mountains and lay like silence in the desert, and it carved the shadows of great rocks like time."