Each chapter begins with the narrator rising very early in the morning and lighting a fire to start his day. ‘A Box of Matches’ by Nicholson Baker is my current book, and I’ve been taking my time getting through it because it’s that leisurely and enjoyable. Baker is the author of one of my favorite teen-reads, ‘Vox’, which is actually quite a sexually-adventuresome adult novel, but I’ve always been more mature than one would believe. In high school, I’d stay up late at night, a single reading lamp lighting the book and surrounding bed on which I laid, and I’d imagine the world of words, late-night conversations, and adult maneuvering as I fitfully twisted and turned beneath the covers.

‘A Box of Matches’ is a far-cry from the erotic fiction of ‘Vox’ and much more resonant with a fifty-year-old making his way in the winter of 2026. It’s not without underlying tension, the way most of life after the midway point comes with the possibility of peril and loss around every corner. It’s a comfort as well, which is the point of any good winter read.

“I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of a man I had hoped I might be.”
? Nicholson Baker, ‘The Mezzanine‘

By William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

“Out of our need we patronize our artists, we flirt with our poets, we petition our architects: Give us your lusty colorful world. Signal to us a state of being more richly steeped in purpose and satisfaction than our own. Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don’t in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.” – Gregory Maguire, ‘Mirror Mirror’

“The human mind – we have come to observe – tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s mite. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.

Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits  with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned.” ~ Gregory Maguire, ‘Mirror Mirror’

“Yet the world was a spectacle, its own old argument for itself. Endlessly expounded with every new articulation of leaf and limb, laugh and lamb, loaf and loam. Surely there was something in the world lovely enough to counter the dread of being alone, a solitary figure untroubled by ambition, unfettered by talent, uncertain of a damn thing?…

The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.” ~ Gregory Maguire, ‘Son of a Witch’

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” ~ Stephen King

“It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s own taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…” ~ Bret Easton Ellis, ‘American Psycho’

Did I mention that things would get dark here this fall? Yes, I did, and I meant it, more than you will ever know. The room darkens as I sit here – the tail end of a day all sadness and sorrow and growing ever dimmer by the minute. Yet I welcome the dark, leaning into it, nudging it gently, like an old familiar friend. Here, by my side, where the dark is the only thing that has never let me down, I find solace, and, as I’ve only been able to glimpse in solitude, a sense of the sublime. How strange and sad that my brushes with the sublime have always been by myself – it would seem to go against the assumed purpose of the world, if we can be so bold as to presume that such purpose is to love and be loved. Therein lies the profound conundrum of my mad existence. 

Don’t treat me special, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. 

“There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why – I couldn’t put my finger on it.” – Bret Easton Ellis, ‘American Psycho’

Three days of rain – occasionally alternating with swiftly-moving clouds and a few brief breaks of sunlight, strange sunlight ever since the eclipse – seem to have had a wayward effect on my mood. Today is due to be overcast, but without any hard rain or wind, which characterized yesterday’s rollercoaster of emotions. This will likely be the only post of the day, and so I shall pepper it with lots of whimsical links so if your day runs into any doldrums, find your way back here and click away. I’m going to step off-line and find meaning there, where meaning has always resided. In my absence, a few lines from someone far more skilled than me.

A poem by e.e. cummings, who mastered an exquisite economy of words:

Spring is like a perhaps hand 

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.