One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)
Monday, February 21, 2011
Sunday As Usual
February 21, 2010.Sunday.
Situation:Work all day today and do not get home till after dark.No walk for Mway from me today.
There are times I almost regret having made the rule of limiting this journal to one year. You’d think everything could be said in that time. Not so. Last night there was a surprise snowfall here of about four inches. Snow heavy on branches and other objects. Coming up to the clearing, Mway, only a few steps ahead of me, started growling quietly, then stepping back. I looked for something among the cedars in the strawberry field that might be alarming her. Saw nothing. Then, as Mway started backtracking down the path, I moved ahead of her and approached the object that seemed most likely to have been in her line of sight: a small cedar bent over under the snow. I shook the snow off the tree: it sprang upright from its “crouched” position. Mway followed me to it, sniffed it, and was considerably relieved. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Toward the end of 2009, I decided to start keeping a daily journal about taking my wife’s dog for a walk, as an exercise in defiance of a silence that had imposed itself around me (metaphysically, politically, culturally, psychologically – in short, in every way but literally, i.e. aurally). It was not my expectation to dispel the silence: metaphysically it was necessary for a sense of self in the first place; in the other ways it was too powerful for me to do anything about. I only hoped, by a wan gesture of protest, to mark the fact of its imposition, and to the extent that for an entire year I disciplined myself, after I took the dog for a walk (which I did almost every day), to sit down and write about it, I feel that I have been successful in fulfilling that hope. (For more, go to my introductory post of December 21, 2010, Walk to Mark the Silence.)
3 comments:
And kept my nose in it for most of this day. M.
There are times I almost regret having made the rule of limiting this journal to one year. You’d think everything could be said in that time. Not so. Last night there was a surprise snowfall here of about four inches. Snow heavy on branches and other objects. Coming up to the clearing, Mway, only a few steps ahead of me, started growling quietly, then stepping back. I looked for something among the cedars in the strawberry field that might be alarming her. Saw nothing. Then, as Mway started backtracking down the path, I moved ahead of her and approached the object that seemed most likely to have been in her line of sight: a small cedar bent over under the snow. I shook the snow off the tree: it sprang upright from its “crouched” position. Mway followed me to it, sniffed it, and was considerably relieved. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
I don’t think my precautions were at all unreasonable. Did I show any embarrassment at my “mistake”? I don’t have the time for this. M.
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