Quelle journée admirable ! J’ai passé toute la matinée étendu sur l’herbe, devant ma maison, sous l’énorme platane qui la couvre, l’abrite et l’ombrage tout entière. J’aime ce pays, et j’aime y vivre parce que j’y ai mes racines, ces profondes et délicates racines, qui attachent un homme à la terre où sont nés et morts ses aïeux, qui l’attachent à ce qu’on pense et à ce qu’on mange, aux usages comme aux nourritures, aux locutions locales, aux intonations des paysans, aux odeurs du sol, des villages et de l’air lui-même.

Guy de Maupassant, “Le Horla.”

Any annoyance, reservation or irresolution which until now may have blistered and impaired evolution of life was this morning swept away in a stream of billowing summer air. It awakened with shameless self-indulgence a satisfaction of life’s entirety; and evoked a nostalgic recollection of the past and a sanguine look to the future. The purgative early morning bicycle ride was estolled by lolling on the patio in the irradiating heat and light of the lemony sun.

Tomorrow we’ll breakfast on another patio at the golf club overlooking the first tee. But for today it was the staples of crisp green Granny apples, prunes, a Champfleury cheese wedge, All-Bran drowned in Almond Breeze followed by an Atkins special perfumed in clear golden fat.

This afternoon while sailing along the Appleton Side Road was a panorama of precisely cultivated and already burgeoning burrows of emerald corn stalks.

Whatever erstwhile motive may have invited calculation of a better place on the planet to live suddenly evaporated like mist within the rising illumination.

The Magus echoed like a sorcerer’s wand that we depart whence we began only to return thereto with new found conversancy and enlargement. This sublime happiness is to me like the spellbinding allure of a fine crystal sherry decanter, a distilled amber toxicity. After year’s of unintentional obfuscation I have arisen among the ether of vapours and impressions.

(also aether) Physics, archaic a very rarefied and highly elastic substance formerly believed to permeate all space, including the interstices between the particles of matter, and to be the medium whose vibrations constituted light and other electromagnetic radiation: the motion of the planets would be retarded by the ether through which they moved.

I am awash with the magnificence of life and fortuity! But I reckon the compass of life. By what marvellous accident we wend about the complications of opportunity and peculiarity, recognition and novelty, depth and shallows.