Saturday, June 04, 2005

The rat in the rain

Like so many places, Washington D.C. is at its best in the rain. A cool, heavy smell of humidity pervades the whole city on a rainy day. I can almost taste the flavor of the wet pavement, the brick buildings and the damp trees. In the rain, I remember how much this city is one of gardens, each front step crowded by flowers hanging from thin stems and weighted by droplets. I'm sure not everyone would agree with my ideas on rain. But I like the way it staves off the thick heat. I like the way the young professionals crowd under the awning at the Trio Fox and Hound, drinking and talking, still dressed up from work.

Last night, I walked home in the faint drizzle and encountered a rat. He looked quite unconcerned, nosing about in someone's front garden in a particularly weedy patch behind a low cast-iron fence. When he noticed me looking, he quickened his pace just a bit, hurrying into a patch of shrubs, then tracking his way along a beaten path through the long grass that must have felt his exploring feet many times. His rear humped up behind him in typical rat fashion and his tail balanced him as he walked, a picture I've seen many times - my pet rat, Nutmeg, some years ago now, shared all the same mannerisms. I've never seen a city rat quite so close up before. Eventually he escaped my prying eyes and vanished into his narrow rat world.

And today, in the continuing damp, I sat with a coworker and two area science writers at the aforementioned Fox and Hound. A pleasant evening, all round. Our conversation revolved around science writing, as is natural, and politics, of course. We're in D.C., after all.

With all the politics surrounding me here in the consummately political capital of the U.S., I sometimes think about the personal nature of this blog and, in fact, most of my writing. Should I involve myself, more than I do in my day to day work, in the roiling political conversation that's ongoing on the streets, in the newspapers and, most of all, on the internet? In many ways I can't avoid it, nor would I want to.

But I rather liked what Tony Kushner wrote about Arthur Miller this month in The Nation: "He felt his successes and failures as a human being were consequential to something greater than himself, and so they were publicly examined and, in a sense, worth talking about. He wasn't certain that a single individual has relevance to our collective survival, but he saw no other question worth pursuing.

...Arthur focused his critical gaze... within the arena of an individual consciousness, in an important sense his own individual consciousness."

The rat in the rain. There's something admirable about its sense of self, that total independence of endeavor.