When and how do you learn how big the world is?

Sixteen years old, somehow possessing a driver’s license, I drove up and down these roads every time I wanted to get anywhere. Rural life is unimaginable without a car or truck - how do you get to your crummy fast-food job? How do you get to the supermarket? Buy cigarettes? Visit friends? Back home we drive these roads because we have to. Driving along County Route 23 and 66 and 9H and 9G, I felt truly independent for the first time, and truly alone, and very flimsy. I saw how easy it would be to die out there, and I saw how meaningless my fear was.

This landscape shaped me. Black bare tree branches against a bright twilight sky. Boris Pasternak spoke of “the pure essence of poetry - it is disturbing, like the ominous turning of a dozen windmills at the edge of a bare field in the black year of famine.” Riding these roads I think I know what he was talking about. Great art shows us how our suffering means so little to the universe. How these things we build will outlive us. How hunger and loneliness and loss and aesthetic ecstasy are all symptoms of our own threadbare mortality.

Last month, home for Thanksgiving, Amber drove me and Juancy to Chatham in search of yarn. I took these photographs through the window.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.