I like driving top down through a light to moderate fog. Not really sure why. There is a certain muffling to sound in a fog, a refracting of sound waves (if sound waves can refract, if they cannot, then let's blame the effect on the God Particle) that makes me want to listen more intently as I pass along the familiar pathway from home to campus.
Like bodiless water passing in a sigh,
Thro’ palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
And in their sharp disastrous undertow
Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.
- from Fog, by Louise Imogen Guiney
Though we have been enjoying a beautiful spate of summer-come-lately, even with temperatures in the low 80's (upper 20's C), the sun is no longer as warm and intense, the days are noticeably shorter, leaves are starting to fall, and there is that particular crisp in the air that we instinctively know in our bones of ancient wisdom means summer is leaving. It is the hinge in Stanley Kunitz' End of Summer:
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
If we're honest, many of us greet this with at least a flicker of nostalgic relief. By the end of any given season we may tire of its signature taste and yearn for the remembered favors of the familiar next course. From this vantage point at the end of still-warm-but-fading summer I can appreciate the idea of a warm sweater, a [politically correct gas] fire's warmth controlled incrementally by proximity, curling up with a good book in a circle of lamp light because it's too dark and wet and cold to do anything useful outside.
I was in the mood for some Belle and Sebastian this morning, so today's soundtrack hails from their most-recent album, Write About Love.
Today's full playlist:
- I Didn't See It Coming
- Come On Sister
- Calculating Bimbo
- I Want the World to Stop
- Posted via Hermes.
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