On the day of the winter solstice, 2008, the sun heads down in the West over Windsor Terrace and casts its longest shadows of the year into the Vanderbilt Street Playground.
Not for the first time, I think of Narnia's "Lantern Waste," but there are no fauns in sight, and the White Witch has just begun her reign.
At 3:30 p.m., only the top of Lookout Hill remains gilded, and not for long. Between now and the arbitrarily set date of December 25, the pagan and Christian in me overlap, and no one gets it better than that rascal, G.K. Chesterton:
There is heard a hymn when
the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.
Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.
And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.
The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.
—G.K. Chesterton, A Child of the Snows
EXCELLENT PARK-LINKAGE ALERT:
I shoulda been there, but fortunately the mystic bloggeuse Amarilla reports excellently on the event: the performance of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" in the park's Lefferts Homestead last Friday by the "Rebellious Subjects" troupe. The show went on...in the sleet, indoors and out. It sounds amazing in the way that only things in Brooklyn can be amazing; check out her account (which, in her fashion, segues into an intriguing digression on Aurelius...)
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