Out for a walk
First nice day of spring.
It was too nice to stay inside, so I went out and got on the first bus I saw. It took me to Kenmore, and I walked around the Back Bay a bit until I found a way over to the Charles River Esplanade, and I walked down that to the Longfellow Bridge. I stopped at the pier towers for a while just to watch the river and the city: the long swell on the river far below, the heat and intensity of the sunlight, and the height of the sky had what for me is a restorative sense of magnitude, or even numinosity. I need to get a better camera: my phone took horrible pictures that don't capture a single bit of what I mean.
This elemental vastness is what keeps me sane and happy, and it's a good thing I can find it even in the middle of Boston. The more I'm stuck on overcrowded buses, doing menial office work, and wishing horrible curses on all my incredibly loud and inconsiderate neighbors, the more all this pointless nonsense wastes my life. It's not that I start to doubt my belief in the irrelevancy of those things -- and I genuinely do believe that they only diminish the human experience -- but the memory of the things that do matter fades. Not the knowledge of them, just the experience of them. And all the daily trivialities that cost so much in dignity and independence overpower them, so I become isolated from what I see as the real world.
It's like the distinction between 'world' and 'earth': 'world' being the conscious representation of everything in our life as a society, and 'earth' being the physical object we happen to live on, and the life and processes that go on in it. Call it decompressing, or recharging, or connecting with our savanna-dweller instincts, whatever. I just don't believe people are capable of staying emotionally balanced in the dirty, claustrophobic yuppie utopia we're so intent on building for ourselves.
I really want to get back out on the water again.
After the bridge, I walked down Memorial on the Cambridge side of the Charles, past MIT. The Harvard Bridge was closed for some movie shoot, so I crossed at the BU bridge, where I saw a flock of snow geese resting, and took the bus back home.
It was too nice to stay inside, so I went out and got on the first bus I saw. It took me to Kenmore, and I walked around the Back Bay a bit until I found a way over to the Charles River Esplanade, and I walked down that to the Longfellow Bridge. I stopped at the pier towers for a while just to watch the river and the city: the long swell on the river far below, the heat and intensity of the sunlight, and the height of the sky had what for me is a restorative sense of magnitude, or even numinosity. I need to get a better camera: my phone took horrible pictures that don't capture a single bit of what I mean.
This elemental vastness is what keeps me sane and happy, and it's a good thing I can find it even in the middle of Boston. The more I'm stuck on overcrowded buses, doing menial office work, and wishing horrible curses on all my incredibly loud and inconsiderate neighbors, the more all this pointless nonsense wastes my life. It's not that I start to doubt my belief in the irrelevancy of those things -- and I genuinely do believe that they only diminish the human experience -- but the memory of the things that do matter fades. Not the knowledge of them, just the experience of them. And all the daily trivialities that cost so much in dignity and independence overpower them, so I become isolated from what I see as the real world.
It's like the distinction between 'world' and 'earth': 'world' being the conscious representation of everything in our life as a society, and 'earth' being the physical object we happen to live on, and the life and processes that go on in it. Call it decompressing, or recharging, or connecting with our savanna-dweller instincts, whatever. I just don't believe people are capable of staying emotionally balanced in the dirty, claustrophobic yuppie utopia we're so intent on building for ourselves.
I really want to get back out on the water again.
After the bridge, I walked down Memorial on the Cambridge side of the Charles, past MIT. The Harvard Bridge was closed for some movie shoot, so I crossed at the BU bridge, where I saw a flock of snow geese resting, and took the bus back home.
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