Change defines the present: movings, weddings, births. This is the season of clean carpets and filthy fingernails, ants in the cupboards, spiders under the toilet. The only good thing about today (K & I agreed) is that it means that yesterday - and its hours of shuffling, restacking, packing, boxing, cleaning, swiping, scrubbing, daubing - is over. Like a tortoise, all my possessions are now in boxes and in my car. And dismantling the house K & I shared has been difficult. As I was selling my library I came across The Fellowship of the Ring (in the wake of its Hollywoodization I'd forgotten how good it is) and as I read the beginning I was struck by Frodo's leaving of the Shire. Of course we know it's a small thing compared to how he will be involved with the fate of the Ring, but still. Something about it made me feel sad, and also understood: "Frodo walked round the familiar rooms and saw the light of the sunset fade on the walls, and shadows creep out of the corners. It grew slowly dark indoors."
We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
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