The islands

The islands are on my mind right now as the light of a winter afternoon declines. It has been our second sunny day in two weeks. Specifically Ireland and Scotland, and generally the islands that are outliers to both this world and "the undiscovered country" to which Hamlet refers: sleep, dreams, and what lies beyond this life.

over the wall

One of my most pleasant and rewarding reading experiences recently caught me off guard. At breakfast at the end of an overnight trip with students, I was flipping through last week's New Yorker and read "Over the Wall." I finished reading it on the school bus back to town. The link is above, but alas only to an abstract as of yet. A summary of the organization of ideas in the piece doesn't begin to account for its appeal. I especially like the quietness with which the author, Angell, catalogues things his wife doesn't know, because she has passed away, and relates his father-in-law's dream. He dreamed he saw his daughter, Angell's wife, walking a dog in Central Park, then sprouting feathers, then flying away over the low wall. It is a dream of leaving and losing and letting go.

That is two times in the past twenty-four hours that I have been reminded of my dream about the lighthouse. Angell's father-in-law's dream made sense as a narrative, which dreams rarely do. The other thing that reminded me of that lighthouse was the shaky tower used for launching on a zipline at the YMCA camp we visited.

Then in a totally different mood, the satire of Nate Silver's election statistics on the next page of the magazine was refreshing.

Although I slept last night, a nap was still in order. I fell asleep after reading about thirty poems by Irishwoman Eavan Boland and awoke to hear my husband working out "The New Highland Laddie" on his baroque lute. It's old to me, he said, but it's new to this lute. It's an old tune, from a twenty-first century standpoint, with a musical sensibility beyond its time.