“Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have no bottom but the Abyss!”
Excerpt From
The French Revolution
Thomas Carlyle
It is perhaps the overbearing reflectiveness wrought by the New Year that prompts me to recall the inexpressible value of friendship. Where will we be another year from now? What intervening delights or perils will attach themselves to our natural evolution? What lingering regrets, if any, will persist to haunt us upon our recollection of the past, the people whom we have known, the places we have been, the things we have done? It is a topical and sometimes burdensome project of reminiscence at this time of year, before the frozen snow is gone or the brown fields have revived their verdant luxury, before the solemn weight of February has disappeared into the earth abandoned by the groundhog, before springtime magically revives our unadulterated purpose and ambition?
The gusto of the New Year is upon us! For the next several days I shall be overtaken by the promise of novelty and reactive engineering. Last evening in anticipation of this purifying juncture I began my amendment by deleting from my computing devices volumes of files, books and music which are either no longer relevant or which have extended resemblance of any possible utility far beyond conceivable application. In short it was an overall cleanse of whatever texture was within my most frequented sphere. Thus enthused I stole to my lair upstairs. It was long after the firecrackers had stopped at midnight at nearby Baker’s Cay and the erstwhile riotous clamour had subdued to intermittent boisterous echoes only. I hid under the duvet and remorselessly said goodbye to 2022.
I say this without waver or desire to offend by any perceived standard of indelicacy; viz., it was another awesome day on Key Largo, clear blue sky, a soothing southerly wind and warm beguiling temperatures. The anticipatory chitter-chatter about the pool was the 5:00 pm social gathering at the island point to celebrate the last sunset of the year. “Bring an appetizer to share and your own beverage.”
For me however the New Year’s Eve party started at 3:30 pm this afternoon, the moment I tricycled back home following a day of solar absorption and lighthearted conversation while wallowing nonchalantly in the pool. Nor was the festive buoyancy the evident prolongation of sunshine after surpassing the Winter Solstice. The sunlight yet streamed brilliantly above the tops of the palm trees when only days before it had mournfully threatened to dissolve into obscurity.
One day long, long ago before the sky had clouds, in a time when touching was a means of communicating, a little boy named Lex met a little girl named RayRay. RayRay was a very pretty little girl with ten toes and blonde braided hair.
Anyone who has conducted an insightful examination of global history soon discovers that the theme of benefit is governed by interested parties. These two polar elements of existence – advantage and control – are in the result effectively in the hands of whomever is at the steering wheel. The alignment is as elemental as nutrition and appetite; that is, people (like any animal) are instinctively governed in what they eat by what they want to eat. This paradigm is however changing. Which is not to suggest or pretend like Pollyanna that people are becoming more altruistic or beneficent; rather that appetites are changing albeit predominantly unwittingly.
We were late getting going this morning, a bright and clear, fresh day with a predicted high of 72°F reminiscent of Hilton Head Island. I couldn’t convince myself to make my bed (that youthful legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic). So instead, wavering on the edge I slumped back onto the bed, burying beneath the duvet to avoid the breeze of the overhead fan and to cover my impudence. It was after eleven o’clock before I stumbled into the shower and did what I could to improve my plummeting public appearance.
We’re nearing the end of the effect of the northern snow storm, reportedly for the locals here a 4-year record. The ambient temperature (68°F) is rising by the hour and the grey clouds are dispersing. By tomorrow it should be 72°F. In an effort to regain my toppled stability, I donned my black bathing suit, mounted my tricycle and went for a swim in the central pool. There was no one else there. The water was cool but far from frigid. The refreshment soothed my aching limbs, arthritic ribs and lower spine. I plunged and swam back and forth from one end of the pool to the other, extending my body from the middle, left and right, up and down. I suspect the few people who occasionally ventured into the pool area to attend one of the nearby condominium management offices viewed my wintry, watery enterprise quizzically.
“The south-western part of Kerry is now well known as the most beautiful tract in the British isles. The mountains, the glens, the capes stretching far into the Atlantic, the crags on which the eagles build, the rivulets brawling down rocky passes, the lakes overhung by groves in which the wild deer find covert, attract every summer crowds of wanderers sated with the business and the pleasures of great cities. The beauties of that country are indeed too often hidden in the mist and rain which the west wind brings up from a boundless ocean. But, on the rare days when the sun shines out in all his glory, the landscape has a freshness and a warmth of colouring seldom found in our latitude. The myrtle loves the soil. The arbutus thrives better than even on the sunny shore of Calabria. The turf is of livelier hue than elsewhere: the hills glow with a richer purple: the varnish of the holly and ivy is more glossy; and berries of a brighter red peep through foliage of a brighter green.”
Excerpt From
The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 3
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Listening to Dave Brubeck playing O Tannenbaum on Ultimate Calm Christmas Jazz. It is the required relief from Handel’s Messiah and Mantovani’s Greatest Songs of Christmas. Appropriate to have some music on Christmas morning or indeed any morning for that matter, as I have always done while munching my sliced green apple and reading the overnight email. I caught myself staring blankly out the lanai window over the boat slip onto what at first I thought was a flashing light from the second storey balcony of the townhouse opposite. It proved to be an overnight light which remained lit this grey Christmas morning, hidden behind the tarnished palm fronds tossed about in the cold northern wind.