Too much an inhabitation of warmth to qualify as inanimate

Poem for the day:

This excerpt from Mark Doty’s poem, “Essay: TheLove of Old Houses“, which is in his book of poems, The Source. Incidentally, he’s taking about the planks of floorboards in the old house.

…Fired just now
by afternoon pouring heat and honey
onto these wide swathes seasoned,
two centuries, to something durable,

too much an inhabitation of warmth
to qualify as inanimate – as though sunlight
softened their cooled, human store
and sent it wafting up like scent

from warmed wax. I know.
I am that firing light, and I’m the hand
that’s oiled these boards
with a resin-and-varnish brew,

tincture that let these cello depths
emerge, and last. And so
what I’ve – we’ve – made is not
outside myself, not exactly;

rather it’s a container —
sagging and shored, corroding
and replenished – in which one
doesnt need to hold oneself together:

relax, and oh, the rooms will do it for you.

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Music for the day:

Today, one of my favorite videos of classical music that I’ve found online – Bach’s six cello suites, with the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on the cello. This is almost 2.5 hours of sheer lyrical beauty and warmth! (Also, if interested is this long article about the Bach cello suites; disclaimer: I have not read it yet.)

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Art for the day:

Today, a painting by Edward Hopper called ‘Sunlight on Brownstones‘, currently at the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas.

This page gives a great introduction to this painting.

Sunlight on Brownstones seems, in many ways, to be the quintessential Hopper painting. The juxtaposition of city and country, light and dark, movement and immobility, are present here, combined with the sense of the moment being transitory; that we have stumbled upon the scene both a little too soon and a little too late. It represents, in Baudelaire’s terms, “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life.”

More at the page itself, including a great description of the juxtaposition of the urban landscape (the brownstone) and the wilderness (greenery) on the other side of the road.