The Dangers of Literature on a Gray Day

Another rainy day in a long sequence of rainy days with no foreseeable respite. Living here can be challenging, even when one has a mind for fog and dampness. Especially when, upon reading, I feel the great weight of loss as if the sun has disappeared from sky forever, masked and shaded by an omnipresent fog of decay.

Dog Years

Upon finishing Mark Doty's memoir Dog Years, I cried, feeling his losses as if they were my own, as if they are my own.

I do not live with a dog, but my cat grows old and older each day, keeps to my bed making it hers, and mostly does not come downstairs. She, like Doty's beloved Beau, is disappearing into something other than this.

As he writes, "Everything dies, because the world's only a constantly mutating mask for the deep, wild life of energy, veiling itself over and over as matter, taking shaping in order to express the dynamic nature of its character, plunging into matter and sailing up -- as if inside the belly of a vulture -- into energetic life again."

But it is hard to think of "dynamic nature" and "energetic life" when the weather outside closes me inside, day after day.

Please, sun, return soon.