I’ve been quarantining, more or less, since I brought Covid back with me from Switzerland. (Conferences in Europe these days seem to be very efficient super-spreaders). It’s Day 17 now, with symptoms and positivity having returned last week after a few days of feeling fine and testing negative. Like Edward Gorey’s doubtful guest, this one seems reluctant to pack up its bags and leave.
But thanks to a wonderful uncle-and-aunt-in-law’s cabin, I am currently enjoying the festival around me, which that great anti-capitalist monk Thomas Merton described this way in “Rain and the Rhinoceros“:
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with inconsistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.
There’s a naïveté to Merton’s writing here, which I first read as an undergrad in Theodore Roszak’s countercultural Sources anthology (a formative reading experience for me). But at times like this, that naïveté is appealing.
He continues:
I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! [. . .]
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
But I am also going to sleep, because here in this wilderness I have learned how to sleep again.
