Things shared

My good friend Hamlet wrote a piece about Don Quixote that I enjoyed enormously. I love his notion that the everyday populace finds echo in Don Quixote, in terms of systems of morality that no longer make sense in today's world. Perhaps people understand and empathize with Don Quixote's absurdity as the only rational approach in the face of the world's "practicality." Perhaps the book reminds them, with a dose of snide, satisfying amusement, that fundamentally it's society that's absurd, not Don Quixote -- or any of us.

My sister, meanwhile, shared a website of bird photography by a fellow birdwatcher in Massachusetts. My favorite photo is this one. Birds are so tiny and apparently fragile in the face of nature's enormousness and inhospitality -- just look at the rushing water, that pointed rock. In a moment, that teensy round splotch will plunge underwater and pop back out again, flicking the damp off his feathers, as undaunted as a bobbing cork. He's as gray as his surroundings, part of them, really, unified with all that rough cold. "Behold the birds of the air, they do not sow, neither do they reap..."

But then, of course, I remember chickadees, which manage somehow to survive the north's frigid winters. Miniscule knots of feathers, they sometimes freeze to death in their sleep when they can't find enough food to power them through the entire night. Morning comes, and, next to a treetrunk somewhere, a huddled bit of fluff simply doesn't budge again.

Victory comes late—
And is held low to freezing lips—
Too rapt with frost
To take it—
How sweet it would have tasted—
Just a Drop—
Was God so economical?
His Table's spread too high for Us—
Unless We dine on tiptoe—
Crumbs—fit such little mouths—
Cherries—suit Robins—
The Eagle's Golden Breakfast strangles—Them—
God keep His Oath to Sparrows—
Who of little Love—know how to starve—

-Emily Dickinson

Neither great comment from Dickinson or the Bible, though, anthropomorphized as they are, seems to suit the real lives of wild creatures. Birds simply live out there, tough as wire, built both for the violence and the sweetness.

As for me, I'm reading Tess of the D'Urberville's. It's rough going. I feel tragedy lurking ahead, though right now I'm all caught up in the beauty and fragility of Tess' world and her love for Angel Clare, despite the dark portents creeping around the edges of her dairymaid's life. After every page I set the book down, wailing in my head, "oh, nooo...", not wanting to go further, wanting to remain suspended, willing the book to turn out happily and knowing it won't. Why did Thomas Hardy, that brilliant novelist, have to write so many tragedies?

So I've been doing that, and trying to finish my thesis, of course. Tilting at windmills - to bring this entry full circle.