20131021.0626

I have mentioned some few times my reading of and work with the published writings of JRR Tolkien--both scholarly writings and fiction.  In the main line of his fiction, the Middle-earth corpus, Tolkien expresses a preference for moonlight over sunlight.  The first of the Two Trees is the tree from which the moon arises, and the moon precedes the sun in being created.  Moonlight factors into his stories as plot devices (the moon-runes in The Hobbit, for example, and on the gate of Moria in Lord of the Rings), and far more often and importantly than the sun.  That Middle-earth privileges moonlight over sunshine is obvious, then, and it is a privileging with which I agree.

One of the things that The City strips away is the ability to see the play of moonlight over the landscape.  That people must act in the nighttime hours means that they must make light with which to see, and the lights made for and by so many people crowd out the gentle silver of the moon's reflected radiance in the gleam of mercury vapor tortured by electricity.  There is a certain ambience that the lighting promotes, particularly in The City where it accompanies labyrinthine ribbons of roadway constrained between towers of concrete, glass, and steel, but that atmosphere is as choking as the minotaur's domain could easily be--and I have spoken to the bovine overtones of life in such a place.

Sherwood Cottage gets to see some of the moonlight, especially on such nights as several of the last few have been--the skies have been more or less clear (except for one rainy evening), and the moon has been full or nearly so.  Even the quotidian domestic work of taking out the trash, leaving it beside the curb for pickup the next day, is made the more wondrous by being coated in celestial silver.  And even in the chilly air of autumn's reminder that winter is not so far away, it is worth standing on the front porch--and I have one here!--and looking out at the world as it sits, quietly and subtly argent in the as much of the full glory of night as it can maintain.

But even at Sherwood Cottage, sitting on a fairly dark street in what is not so large a city, only gets so much.  There are street lights whose not-quite-orange radiance nibbles at the edges of the jeweled Ouranian cloak--they are moths flitting against the long life of the heavens, but they do not spare the warp and weave therefore.  And even out away from town, in what even the locals call the countryside (and that from a place those in The City would think unbearably rustic and provincial--but what do they know?), there are places where that cloak is threadbare.  The occasional lights of hearth and home offer a useful counterpoint, copper to make the silver shine the brighter.  The other lights, oil rigs dotting the fields, are rather cheap sequins amidst diamonds, making the whole more tawdry through their presence.

I am aware of the benefits that accrue to the people here (including me) that they have adorned The Mother with such costume jewelry, children exulting in small works that they give to their parents.  And, like many parents, The Mother wears what her children offer (at least for a time), however bad it might look.  But that such things are suffered out of love does not make them lovely, leaving me in a context I do not yet know how to parse, whether in five paragraphs or five hundred.