I stopped by Eternal Flame, a sim with a spare, ascetic ambiance of bitter winter, because it will be closed to the public soon. It made me think of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, part of his Four Quartets that secured for him the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote this after his conversation and the poem itself is very much a religious poem, but much of it still speaks to me.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?
The poem seems apt for this bright and sunny New Year’s Day, especially the lines from the second section of the poem, “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.” Do I have a new language for this new year? I wonder…
