These days

Here's how the day goes now. I wake grudgingly, reluctant to step out of my bed and into a not-so-early morning. At the toaster downstairs, I commiserate with students whose faces, like mine, are drawn. We complain about paper topics, exam committees delayed, essays to mark. Upstairs again mid-morning is underway, filling my room with sun, but weighing on my mind (to try to get up early and to fail is in many ways worse than not making an effort at all). However, the real trouble right now is focusing. One book, one footnote, leads to another book, another footnote, a new Stephanus number in the massive Plato's Collected, back to the original paragraph whose train of thought I have already jumped.

Elusive mid-morning--lost before I ever grabbed hold. Now slipping through my fingers, the liquid hours of early afternoon. We take Philosopher's Walk to lunch: bowls of vermicelli in a restaurant with yellow walls and chairs and loud conversation. The extravagant color and words stave off worry, but when we leave, I am confronted again with dwindling hours. No use trying to capture them; instead I turn and run to the nearest coffee shop with couches in a back corner, where I hide behind an assigned essay while the minutes flow by out the window. Assigned essay: meaning, it has to be read today, but is not at all related to the research waiting to be done with those books in my room--those books and their troublesome, recursive footnotes.

Late afternoon and I have made myself return through streets muddy with spring. The work gets slower as the light grows longer (which is saying something, right? It was slow to begin with.) But new tendrils of thought are curling across the ground. When the dark comes, sifting through the blue time, pressing boldly against the window pane (is it jealous of the light?)--with dark the last vestiges of motivation take flight. I convince myself to pursue them. However, the convincing is a sham. I know the path I'm taking, and it leads through dreams.

Celebrating sans celebration

I am here to tell you that grown-up birthdays (away from home on work-filled weekends) are hard. One would think that getting to listen to papers on Aristotle from 9 until 1, and hearing J. present some very nice comments on a faculty paper, on the celebratory day would be cake enough. But after the Aristotle there was marking to be done, and even coffee couldn't add festivity to those pages and pages of arguments on (cheerfully enough) mental disorders.

Pre-Toronto birthdays have always fallen on spring break, and I realize now how spoiled I've been. Being on spring break means that there aren't any papers due soon or classes to prepare for or grades to worry about. Nearing the end of a semester means all of that and more. Even a dinner planned for tonight--my one attempt at celebration--has been pushed back a few days to accommodate schedules that seem suddenly frantic with the turning of the month.

So, yes, a grown-up birthday.

But not joyless.

For years now, I have been repeating a quote by the American psychiatrist, David Viscott: "To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides." And although yesterday went mostly uncelebrated (in the robust sense of the word), the notes I found from family and friends--in packages or slipped under my door or on my phone or in various corners of the world wide web--flooded my day with sunshine. I am more grateful for that light than I can say.

A virtuous solitude

"John Climacus" is the picture across from my armchair. A ladder leans against papered walls, forming the third side of a scalene triangle, its rungs striping a solid second and third sides down wainscoting and over floorboards. The rungs at the top of the ladder disappear into folds of an ornithological curtain: dark shapes hover, fold with the creases of the material, and lead to vague speculation about wings and windows in the beyond, where the ladder has presumably broken through.

John Climacus was a monk and then hermit who spent his days (at first) and (then) his whole life wandering Mt. Sinai. He went seeking the virtues and silence. The great question is whether or not he found them--there, where the overhead wings blackened mountaintops with rippling shadow and where there was nothing to obscure the geometry of plant leaf and woody stem. Can virtue fraternize with solitude for a lifetime?

From where I sit, it's unclear. For all I know, the ladder ends once it hits that veil, the reach of its two long arms truncated by the hem of the fabric. Or it keeps going. Or it makes it to the edge of the window sill and falls short. If I really wanted to know, I would leave my armchair, and I would climb through the frame, and I would make that rickety, uncertain ascent. My yes to the question.

Coming slowly, slowly coming. Slowly.

Spring. For the last five days, the sun has risen in a blue sky and the air has been mild. I've been leaving my window open at night because otherwise the temperature and humidity in my room rise to sauna-like levels. (This is one of the reasons I've decided to move down the street for the summer. Not only is the rent $500 less than Wycliffe, but they have air conditioning.) When I walk to the department, I regularly see small dark sparrows scavenging across the sidewalks, and the black squirrels are also making their presence known more frequently.

I never like spring when I think about it in the abstract. "Spring" reminds me of Saturday mornings when I wake up too late to an unforgiving daylight illuminating every nook and cranny of my dirty room; when, disgusted with the clutter and the grime, I have to clean before I can get any real work done. And yet somehow, every year, when spring arrives in all the glory of its particularity, I fall in love. With the sparrows and black squirrels; with the dry grass and expanses of mud; with the crooked limbs of trees; and, most of all, with the bold light that lays bare all the earth's wintry wounds.I fall in love because it is the end of the cold and the dark, and because now I have license to rejoice in the promise of color and warmth. The healing--the annual resurrection of this weary world--has begun.

Don't miss this

Of Gods and Men is a somber, timely reflection on what it means to be people of faith and tenders of the flock in the hard places. It's also the first movie I've seen in a while that isn't a parody or exposé of a Catholic community. The New York Times has a nice review here.

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I have been spending most of my weekends with J. and his family or friends. This weekend was a family weekend. Last night both J.'s sisters were at the apartment. We did homework until 9 o'clock, and then J. cooked us dinner. He prepared trout with mango sauce, risotto, and asparagus. We watched the new Sherlock Holmes while we ate. I've decided that movie is about 45 minutes too long. The editor should have cut giant swathes out of the opening hour and a half. Sometime after midnight I went to bed. J. and his sisters went back to studying. I may never get used to these strange, South American hours.

Today J.'s parents came. They brought groceries and made us a late lunch. J. said I was just like his mom (because we're both thin, we're frequently cold, and we laugh uncontrollably when we're tired). J.'s sister said that was very Freudian of him. There was some trouble about the pronunciation of "Freud," and I concluded that Freud may have been right about some things (but refused to divulge specifics). Somehow our talk turned to fruit, and J.'s dad told me about the varieties of mango in Columbia.When the afternoon sun flooded the apartment, we ate cheesecake and played word games until I had to go back downtown.

I was happy during the subway ride home. I miss being in the company of families and eating really good food on a regular basis. I even miss trying to do homework when there are people vacuuming and arguing and laughing. Another month and four papers lie between me and my Pacific Northwest home.

What I'm longing for today:

Urban economics

The independently-owned coffee shop next to the department is gone. Overnight they packed up their furniture and espresso machines; a banner appeared in the window ("Thanks for 20 years"); and they were gone. To get coffee I now have to go across the street to a franchise, which means being in the cold for longer and getting unevenly-brewed coffee from a coffee stand rather than an actual shop. I was lamenting the death of the Daily Express in my carrel room yesterday, and I asked what had happened. My carrel-mate said, slowly and seriously, "Our coffee shop was a casualty of capitalism." And then he explained why.

Several years ago a construction company from Kazakhstan unveiled plans to build a 33-story luxury apartment complex one block east of the department. Their plans were rejected because of zoning by-laws, but the construction company appealed to an Ontario planning committee which is comprised of members with a vested interest in business and which has the power to overrule municipal decisions. The planning committee agreed to the construction of the apartment complex.

Here's why they shouldn't have: (1) the trees. 33-story buildings cast long shadows. Many of the mature trees in the building's vicinity are going to wither from lack of sun. (2) The complex is across the street from a subway stop that is already over-capacity. The residents of the apartments who will now use this stop in their daily commute will only make things worse. (3) Luxury apartments attract people with money, and the businesses around the complex will now be able to charge higher leases which local businesses (like my coffee shop!) can't afford.

Those are the first-order effects of the new high-rise. To see the second-order effects, we have to look more closely. What happens when the locally-owned coffee shop goes? Well, first, because the owner and employees all lived in the neighborhood, the money the shop made stayed (for the most part) in the neighborhood--in this area of downtown Toronto. While the franchise we assume will take the Daily Express' place will pay local employees, most of its earnings will be handed over to a company that isn't Toronto-based. Second, the Daily Express contributed to the neighborhood community. The homeless man who has lingered on this corner for ten years (a victim of cutbacks in funding for psychological and disability treatments) was comfortable with the owners, who gave him free coffee when the weather was cold. He's too proud to accept cash, but faculty members would leave money for him with the baristas. Of course there are good franchises, but it's harder to be generous when you're keeping financial accounts for an employer you rarely see.

I learned yesterday that I'm not the only one who's missing the coffee shop downstairs. But I also got a mini-lesson in urban economics. Having to walk across the street for coffee is just the first of our problems.

March haiku

these crows dance blackly
a score of anxious shadows
averse to slow spring