“I like things I can see as much as things I can’t (see)…that inner light was drawing me in.”
It was an innocuous line by Murakami in Killing Commendatore, but for some reason I couldn’t, I can’t, let it go.
And then it’s Baader-Meinhof. You are shopping for a new car, you fall in love with a particular model, and then suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. But the what is what I can’t see.
Murakami is followed by a passage I read by Immanuel Kant:
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
And it’s early Saturday morning. Light rain.
I’m in bed, it’s dark out. The body is spent from the week. The Mind is off on its own, its finger tips touching, exploring, wandering, free, weightless.
The window is cracked open. Rain falls softly, landing on the flat side of leaves, droplets snailing down ever so gently. Somewhere in the distance, a Semi rolls down I-95, light rain is wiped from his windshield with the beat of their flap-flap. He’s racing to beat morning traffic into Manhattan, so he can continue deadheading home to Tennessee to see his wife and children, and sleep in his own bed.
Overhead, thousands of feet up, the rain taps on the hull of a Boeing 737 on its way Westward. Everyone is asleep but for a solitary passenger, his overhead light on, reading a page turner by James Patterson.
A green potted plant, on the window sill in the bathroom, sips moisture from the humidity that fills the room.
The newspaper delivery man (no longer a boy on a bike) rubs the sleep from his eyes. He slides one blue plastic bag on after another and tosses the papers into the front seat of his car. The paper lands with a thump on our driveway, and he carries on. The rain drops plop on this double-bagged newspaper, which sits waiting on our driveway, dry, resting.
And then the Earth, absorbing the morning rain, emits a rich, deep smell that fills the room. The immensity of an attempt, my attempt, to describe it, a failure, yet this triggers a passage from Claire Fuller’s new book Bitter Orange:
Soon one of these sleeps will be my last. I will never again gaze up through the branches of a tree to see light moving between the leaves, never press hard against the bark until its pattern is imprinted on my skin. I will never again smell earth after rain, never hear the sound of water lapping against stone…
And finally, the Mind fingers one last verse, this one from Milosz: How softly it rains / On the roofs of the city / How perfect / All things are.
And with this, the Mind pauses to rest, the light rain ceases rippling its surface, and then it comes. Aha! You ain’t no Murakami or Kant, but, you got it!
I close my eyes smiling, and the rain continues to tap. The Mind now, Quiet.
Aha, How perfect / All things are.
And I sleep.
Photo: Marta Navarro with View on Black (in Light Rain)
