Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Harvest Moon<\/p>\n
Kate and I sat out on the deck with the dogs.\u00a0\u00a0 Il dolce far niente<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 The sweetness of doing nothing was a theme for paintings in the mid-Victorian era.\u00a0 Apparently the Italians have always been after la dolce vita<\/em>.<\/p>\n A point where Kate and I meet, where our inner worlds and outer worlds intersect,\u00a0 is our horror at these moments.\u00a0 There is something in the northern European blood that suspects doing nothing, finds nothing sweet about it.\u00a0 Instead it has a bitter taste, something mom may have given\u00a0 you when you didn’t do your chores.<\/p>\n These later years may be the time to catch up with the Italians, to learn how to kick back and relax.\u00a0 If they’re not, then we’ll never get it, not in this turn of the wheel.<\/p>\n I wrote several hours in a row yesterday and today, but it was not fun.\u00a0 Usually writing pleases me, gives me a sensual satisfaction as well a creative one.\u00a0 Not this time.\u00a0 It was as if I had tried to stick a large ball into a glass Coke bottle.\u00a0 There was too little space in the three thousand words, the maybe 15-18 minutes of spoken English, to contain what I wanted to communicate.<\/p>\n Too much truncating, jumping, glossing.\u00a0 The whole needs more metaphor, a way to condense big ideas into small spaces.\u00a0 I have two metaphors that work pretty well.\u00a0 I use Rembrandt’s etching of Faust and Vermeer’s painting of the Astronomer to illustrate the difference between the ancien regime and the Enlightenment.\u00a0 I also use Petrarch’s letter to posterity to underscore the Italian Renaissance’s influence on our understanding of the individual.\u00a0 So far, so good.<\/p>\n After that, though, I lean more into short summaries of complex ideas, philosophical vignettes no bigger than fortune cookies.\u00a0 All this means I’m not done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Harvest Moon Kate and I sat out on the deck with the dogs.\u00a0\u00a0 Il dolce far niente.\u00a0\u00a0 The sweetness of doing nothing was a theme for paintings in the mid-Victorian era.\u00a0 Apparently the Italians have always been after la dolce vita. A point where Kate and I meet, where our inner worlds and … Continue reading Il Dolce Far Niente<\/span>