No matter how loosely one speaks of life’s affairs, the report of an occasional failed attempt is overall impossible to deny. Some – notably often those who signal life’s success stories – almost make a profession of it, accumulating a contrary history of defeat, bankruptcy and misadventure to adorn and complicate their badges of ultimate triumph. It does however border on classical Greek mythology to suggest that failure is a prerequisite to success – though the parallel is highly persuasive.
It’s windy today 240°WSW, Wind 25 km/h, Gusts 45 km/h, waxing crescent moon illumination 32‰ and Air Pressure 754 mmHg. I no longer have the brass Chelsea barometer left hanging on the wall of our Laura Crescent house from which we summarily departed over a decade ago. The weather – like other features of life – is now a technological feat on my iPhone. But like the creatures and vegetation above and below the river water, we first respond to the weather by instinct and sensation.
Your piece already has a strong, reflective voice, Bill — meditative but edged with an unsparing realism that suits the theme of aging and change. I would recommend a light refinement: to tighten some phrasing, enrich the cadence, and clarify the thread of thought without losing your tone of wistful defiance. Here’s a revision, faithful but more distilled:
I feel today as though I am in a glass jar, sustained somewhere in the middle, surrounded by swirls of change by the innumerable particles in the mix. Bunny is leaving. Other tenants come and go. Children of our friends and relatives are aging and recalculating their future. Friendships percolate and some decline. Political boundaries are wiped and rewritten. But we are steadfast and immovable. When the dust settles – as it always does after the least commotion – and the confusion no longer prevails, the vision magically clears and it is possible to regard the fixtures which remain. Our way is cleared both by the removal of obstruction and by the persistence of the fibre to which we’ve attached. Our resort is blessed with clarity and augmentation.
Last evening we met an actor. The closest I have been to the venerable art of the theatre is having participated in a prep school play over 60 years ago; and, later when in undergraduate studies at Glendon Hall I was head of its theatrical makeup department having then thrived upon my introduction through James Carmen Mainprize to Malabar’s at 14 McCaul Street in downtown Toronto.
Fussing about with AI (specifically ChatGPT) to create bespoke images has reminded me that sometimes I prefer the edited version of my own photography. Unquestionably there are AI renditions which are incomparable. But I recall – no matter how inadvertently – that many of my iPhone creations (admittedly with the benefit of technology) are compelling. Frankly the same applies to what I write and what AI “refines” of what I have written. Preferences pertain.
“Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure of all; ’tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very often to be sought. It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s the end of the clue. The most voluntary death is the finest.”
“Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting. The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually. Why is not the jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein? For a desperate disease a desperate cure.”
“Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth; who mollifies the passions of the soul, as iron is softened by fire; and in his Lazes allows such merry meetings, provided they have a discreet chief to govern and keep them in order, as good and of great utility; drunkenness being, he says, a true and certain trial of every one’s nature, and, withal, fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober. He, moreover, says that wine is able to supply the soul with temperance and the body with health. Nevertheless, these restrictions, in part borrowed from the Carthaginians, please him: that men forbear excesses in the expeditions of war; that every judge and magistrate abstain from it when about the administrations of his place or the consultations of the public affairs; that the day is not to be employed with it, that being a time due to other occupations […]”
“Tis said that the philosopher Stilpo, when oppressed with age, purposely hastened his end by drinking pure wine. The same thing, but not designed by him, despatched also the philosopher Arcesilaus.”
“Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for totally to suppress them is not in him to do.”
Excerpt From
The Essays of Montaigne — Complete
Michel de Montaigne
The only sounds heard on the apartment balcony while absorbed in the dry heat on a sunny day are the throaty burble of a distant field tractor; the springtime squawks of Canada geese on the river or the caw of a nearby crow; and, the occasional buzz of a fly. We maintain two black deck chairs on the balcony throughout the year. They’re sturdily constructed of impenetrable plastic – a valuable though modest purchase from Levi Hardware.
Kintsugi (Japanese: 金継ぎ, lit. ‘golden joinery’), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.
As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.