October 2006
O'er the mountains high I stride:
A wint'ry blast down the mountainside
Tears at my face and at my eyes-
Blow, ye North Wind, blow!
I reach the top, stand on the hill:
The fiendish wind drifts fell and chill;
My breathing life it tries to still.
Blow, ye North Wind, blow!
And as I face the sullen draft
Against my face, I must needs laugh,
For all ye blow away is chaff.
Blow, ye North Wind, blow!
Against thy cutting current keen
I press, as devouring demons teem;
I shall defeat thee, thou damned fiends.
Blow, ye North Wind, blow!
Yes, damned thou art, thou fiends who throw
Thy sleet, intent to make me bow,
For it is God who sends the snow-
Blow, ye North Wind, blow!
And in that final fatal hour
I'll breathe my last in my Father's tower,
And thou, North Wind, deprived of pow'r-
Blow, ye North Wind, blow!
Friday, April 18, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Where the Wind Wills, Chapter 1
It is a bleak evening in January, and the north wind whips across the moors of Devonshire, casting up flurries of snow into clouds and pasting every exposed surface with a fine white dusting of the powder. In its headlong career, it lashes the few frozen trees, which groan as they labor upright, while farmers and their wives lie snug in their cottages, the raging gale kept from their homes by chains and barred doors.
A single shepherd befriends a wind-wearied tree as he builds a fire and huddles with his charges on the lee side of the sheltering trunk. His fingers and cheeks bitten by the bitter storm, which howls its constant animosity in his ears, he draws up his cloak against the bleak world and, resting his back to the bark, waits out the night in resigned fortitude. So do the blessed, by the same bars erected to ban evil fortune from their hearths, deprive less fortunate sojourners of their warmth; but conversely, so do these solitary men, when brought into company with another who likewise bears the burdens of necessity, become a mutual bulwark and draw strength from the knowledge that the same fate that cast them down in the world and out from hospitable society has graciously cast them together.
Still sweeping southward, the gale continues until it tears at the eaves of a lonely cottage—a speck on the empty moor which, despite its diminutiveness, is our particular interest. If the house has a squat to its posture which tends to connote a sullen displeasure at the weather, it is belied by the solitary eye, a fire-lit window whose cheery good humor bids a laughing defiance to the grim aspect of winter, by virtue of the delightful warmth embraced by its walls. Let us, for the moment, leave the contemplation of the bitter weather, and avail ourselves of the human company the warm cottage tacitly offers, if it be not an inconvenience to the inhabitants.
Indeed, as with the wind we drift through the tiny chinks of the wooden walls, we are welcomed by a scene of camaraderie and fellowship that so warms one that he feels, with the window aforementioned, he could only be convulsed in gleeful mirth were he to look a hundred baleful winters in the eye. For gathered around a rough board we find three young men whose uproarious gaiety combines with the crackling of the fire and the shrieking of the wind and the groaning of the cottage timbers into one cacophonous symphony.
The reason for their jollity is not immediately apparent, for the table is laid chiefly with tinned food, a few loaves, and the cheapest of cheap wines, and the clothes on their shoulders have felt the claws of several winters’ winds—they are not ragged, but rapidly approaching such a state. The room—there is one only—is barely furnished, containing the board, the crude hearth, and a derelict couch of sorts, along with assorted stools and shelves on which are ranged the larder and a collection of books. The coal-scuttle in the corner very likely carries nearly as much value in its contents as the rest of the house.
But their conversation soon reveals them to be classmates—Oxford men, it seems—and classmates who have not been in class together, nor otherwise seen each other, for some time. Ah, here we may find the answer to our query: for friends who have seen and endured much together are fain to recount those events and enjoy mutual company, even after long separation, else they likely would not together have seen their earlier troubles through. Let us more closely examine our subjects.
The first has his eye consistently directed to a place somewhere beyond the ceiling, or perhaps contemplating the forms in the woodwork, while he addresses his friends (and himself to the viands). He speaks with a dreamy air, as if he were suspended in ether, and cannot bring himself to reminisce about their college days without appending a lengthy dissertation on the questions, academic and personal, they faced and the principles which governed them (though his marks would suggest that he never found quite how to apply those principles in such a way as to answer the questions). On those occasions he lowers his eye to the table, it is with the reluctant demeanour of one who acts of necessity, not of volition; nevertheless, he is principled enough to avidly apply himself to the contents of his plate before returning to his study of the shadows above his head.
The oldest of the party (by a year) is occupied with the crumbs upon the table, rolling them in his fingers and studying them as particularly as if he were determining their value. When he speaks, it is with a confidence founded on empirical proof. Since he is forced by present company to discuss events no longer in existence, he discusses them as they happened, with only the most negligible and unconscious attempt at commentary. One could suppose with little effort that, if he were ever to attempt enduing the facts with some meaning outside what their own being necessarily implied—and caught himself doing so—then he would afterwards gladly swear himself into oblivion, were it not for the invincible combination of his syllogism “All that exists is matter; I exist; therefore I am matter” and his affirmation of the indubitable Natural Law that matter can be neither created nor destroyed.
The last (and the youngest) is, for the time, an enigma. Though the focus of his gaze could be placed at a point somewhere between his two companions and the fire on the horizontal plane and anywhere between the ceiling and the floor on the vertical, were his second friend inclined to precisely measure at any of most given times, his eyes occasionally take on the unfocused glaze of abstraction and pre-occupation. Though he participates as fully in the festivities as the others—this is his house, and he is the host, after all—his mind seems to have other, more pressing, matters upon it. Though his laughter is the loudest, it is the briefest.
Supper is over, and they gather round the fire with their pipes. Perched upon their stools, they continue their reminisces, progressively more slowly and softly as the fire fades. The wall clock ticks off each revolution as if its hands were counting the milestones on their never-ending quest for the end of the clock-face. It is growing late, and the fire has settled down to sleep, its coals only just alive enough to cast abroad a warmth that itself suggests slumber. Their drowse is sometimes stirred by a draft down the chimney, for the fiendish wind cannot bear for another to enjoy a pleasure which it is denied; but when its chill touch has been lifted, the glow settles into a deeper cast.
The particular one draws his hands from his knees and casts his eyes toward his friends: “It is late, and we were long upon the road this morning and afternoon. If you don’t mind, I think I shall retire for the night.” His host silently nods toward the couch, but they first glance toward their friend, whose seat was braced against the wall. Still does he face upward, but his eyes are closed and his mouth draws breath evenly. A slight smile is upon his face in the satisfaction of having forgotten all questions for the time.
“Perhaps we ought to leave him.”
“Perhaps.”
“He cannot wander far.”
“No. He cannot.”
This having been resolved, and the travel-weary guest having retired as suggested, now reclining asleep on the couch—where, even in slumber, his fingers count the threads of the fabric—the youngest of the three turns to his bookshelf, from which he retrieves a large volume bound in leather. It was a birthday gift which he has carried with him through the years since early childhood; as he turns the pages, he traces the plot of his own life as he has set it down upon the blank leaves.
An abnormally strong draft sweeps down upon the coals, causing them to sputter and flare; by their light he reads, occasionally pausing to confirm that his friends still sleep. As he reads, his face grows gradually more serious and absorbed, until even a casual observer would see reflected in it a heart less in sympathy with the merry company over supper or the somnolent glow of the dying fire than with the windswept and turbulent waste outside his window.
A single shepherd befriends a wind-wearied tree as he builds a fire and huddles with his charges on the lee side of the sheltering trunk. His fingers and cheeks bitten by the bitter storm, which howls its constant animosity in his ears, he draws up his cloak against the bleak world and, resting his back to the bark, waits out the night in resigned fortitude. So do the blessed, by the same bars erected to ban evil fortune from their hearths, deprive less fortunate sojourners of their warmth; but conversely, so do these solitary men, when brought into company with another who likewise bears the burdens of necessity, become a mutual bulwark and draw strength from the knowledge that the same fate that cast them down in the world and out from hospitable society has graciously cast them together.
Still sweeping southward, the gale continues until it tears at the eaves of a lonely cottage—a speck on the empty moor which, despite its diminutiveness, is our particular interest. If the house has a squat to its posture which tends to connote a sullen displeasure at the weather, it is belied by the solitary eye, a fire-lit window whose cheery good humor bids a laughing defiance to the grim aspect of winter, by virtue of the delightful warmth embraced by its walls. Let us, for the moment, leave the contemplation of the bitter weather, and avail ourselves of the human company the warm cottage tacitly offers, if it be not an inconvenience to the inhabitants.
Indeed, as with the wind we drift through the tiny chinks of the wooden walls, we are welcomed by a scene of camaraderie and fellowship that so warms one that he feels, with the window aforementioned, he could only be convulsed in gleeful mirth were he to look a hundred baleful winters in the eye. For gathered around a rough board we find three young men whose uproarious gaiety combines with the crackling of the fire and the shrieking of the wind and the groaning of the cottage timbers into one cacophonous symphony.
The reason for their jollity is not immediately apparent, for the table is laid chiefly with tinned food, a few loaves, and the cheapest of cheap wines, and the clothes on their shoulders have felt the claws of several winters’ winds—they are not ragged, but rapidly approaching such a state. The room—there is one only—is barely furnished, containing the board, the crude hearth, and a derelict couch of sorts, along with assorted stools and shelves on which are ranged the larder and a collection of books. The coal-scuttle in the corner very likely carries nearly as much value in its contents as the rest of the house.
But their conversation soon reveals them to be classmates—Oxford men, it seems—and classmates who have not been in class together, nor otherwise seen each other, for some time. Ah, here we may find the answer to our query: for friends who have seen and endured much together are fain to recount those events and enjoy mutual company, even after long separation, else they likely would not together have seen their earlier troubles through. Let us more closely examine our subjects.
The first has his eye consistently directed to a place somewhere beyond the ceiling, or perhaps contemplating the forms in the woodwork, while he addresses his friends (and himself to the viands). He speaks with a dreamy air, as if he were suspended in ether, and cannot bring himself to reminisce about their college days without appending a lengthy dissertation on the questions, academic and personal, they faced and the principles which governed them (though his marks would suggest that he never found quite how to apply those principles in such a way as to answer the questions). On those occasions he lowers his eye to the table, it is with the reluctant demeanour of one who acts of necessity, not of volition; nevertheless, he is principled enough to avidly apply himself to the contents of his plate before returning to his study of the shadows above his head.
The oldest of the party (by a year) is occupied with the crumbs upon the table, rolling them in his fingers and studying them as particularly as if he were determining their value. When he speaks, it is with a confidence founded on empirical proof. Since he is forced by present company to discuss events no longer in existence, he discusses them as they happened, with only the most negligible and unconscious attempt at commentary. One could suppose with little effort that, if he were ever to attempt enduing the facts with some meaning outside what their own being necessarily implied—and caught himself doing so—then he would afterwards gladly swear himself into oblivion, were it not for the invincible combination of his syllogism “All that exists is matter; I exist; therefore I am matter” and his affirmation of the indubitable Natural Law that matter can be neither created nor destroyed.
The last (and the youngest) is, for the time, an enigma. Though the focus of his gaze could be placed at a point somewhere between his two companions and the fire on the horizontal plane and anywhere between the ceiling and the floor on the vertical, were his second friend inclined to precisely measure at any of most given times, his eyes occasionally take on the unfocused glaze of abstraction and pre-occupation. Though he participates as fully in the festivities as the others—this is his house, and he is the host, after all—his mind seems to have other, more pressing, matters upon it. Though his laughter is the loudest, it is the briefest.
Supper is over, and they gather round the fire with their pipes. Perched upon their stools, they continue their reminisces, progressively more slowly and softly as the fire fades. The wall clock ticks off each revolution as if its hands were counting the milestones on their never-ending quest for the end of the clock-face. It is growing late, and the fire has settled down to sleep, its coals only just alive enough to cast abroad a warmth that itself suggests slumber. Their drowse is sometimes stirred by a draft down the chimney, for the fiendish wind cannot bear for another to enjoy a pleasure which it is denied; but when its chill touch has been lifted, the glow settles into a deeper cast.
The particular one draws his hands from his knees and casts his eyes toward his friends: “It is late, and we were long upon the road this morning and afternoon. If you don’t mind, I think I shall retire for the night.” His host silently nods toward the couch, but they first glance toward their friend, whose seat was braced against the wall. Still does he face upward, but his eyes are closed and his mouth draws breath evenly. A slight smile is upon his face in the satisfaction of having forgotten all questions for the time.
“Perhaps we ought to leave him.”
“Perhaps.”
“He cannot wander far.”
“No. He cannot.”
This having been resolved, and the travel-weary guest having retired as suggested, now reclining asleep on the couch—where, even in slumber, his fingers count the threads of the fabric—the youngest of the three turns to his bookshelf, from which he retrieves a large volume bound in leather. It was a birthday gift which he has carried with him through the years since early childhood; as he turns the pages, he traces the plot of his own life as he has set it down upon the blank leaves.
An abnormally strong draft sweeps down upon the coals, causing them to sputter and flare; by their light he reads, occasionally pausing to confirm that his friends still sleep. As he reads, his face grows gradually more serious and absorbed, until even a casual observer would see reflected in it a heart less in sympathy with the merry company over supper or the somnolent glow of the dying fire than with the windswept and turbulent waste outside his window.
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