Sylvan Reverie

There is in stillness oft a magic power
To calm the breast when struggling passions lower,
Touched by its influence, in the soul arise
Diviner feelings, kindred with the skies.
- John Henry Newman

While walking in the park today, I had the pleasure to observe the first signs of Autumn in this North Sea town. A sort of crispness in the air, a few swatches of flaming orange and yellow in the trees and on the ground beneath them; but most of all a sort of idleness, an unmistakable slowing-to-stillness of Nature was the sign I couldn’t help but notice and welcome with a broad smile of satisfaction. The Germans say “In der Ruhe liegt die Kraft” (“In peace lies strength“), and I would have to say that it’s the idle peace of Autumn where I find my strength. I can also identify with the above passage from Newman’s Solitude, with struggling passions as well as the calming power of stillness – perhaps it’s this identification that binds me so close to the season.

From reveries so airy, from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up.
- William Cowper

It’s been a while since I last posted something here. It isn’t because I’m ignoring this blog, it isn’t because nothing is happening, or because I don’t have a multitude of things to say in response to these happenings. It’s because whenever I’ve analyzed my responses – and indeed, most of the happenings themselves – I’ve come away with this amazing impression of emptiness, rather than the profundity I would normally hope to be filled with. Oddly enough, I haven’t been disturbed by this – only that I’ve avoided writing as a result. Given my recent Deliberation post, even emptiness has a purpose – with over a hundred billion times hundreds of billions of stars in the known universe, our universe is still, well, vacuous. So, as William Cowper, myself and others have demonstrated, there is something to be said for airy reveries and empty wells….

Really, you have seen the old age of an eagle,
- Terence

The reality of this hit me like a hammer, as I learned a few days ago that my father was evicted from a house he built with his own hands. He didn’t lose the house because he lacked money, or because he was lazy. He lost his house because, while working ten hour days, he trusted his girlfriend to mail the mortgage checks he wrote. The checks were never mailed, nor were the foreclosure notices ever shown to him.

For a man who grew up while the Beaver and John Wayne were still believable, a world where these concepts are deemed prude and pathological is a dangerous place. Worse for him, he served his country in war and peace for twenty years in the Army – in the twenty years since, it’s never occurred to him that not everyone shares his perspectives on the delegation of responsibility. My mother, having come from this same age of heroic naïvety, only reinforced my father’s confidence in these concepts. Since her death, my father managed to place his trust in one disappointing person after another.

His inability to cope with the way the world works, in fact his almost childlike understanding of social interaction, along with his immense pride, stubbornness and stoicism, have made me realize that Old Age has set his sights on my father. Indeed, if losing wife and home within five years of another and working ten hour days in one’s sixties doesn’t make an old man out of someone, I don’t know what would.

And up to this point, he still doesn’t know that I know about the house, because in his pride, calling his son on the other side of the world is something he can’t bring himself to do. Thankfully, he has another place to go to … regrettably, he’s taken his girlfriend with him.