2003-10-27 - 8:29 a.m.
It's cold and rainy here this morning. As I sit typing, I can look out the window to my left and see vertical slashes of rain cutting the air, and little white points of light dancing randomly across the dark half of the pond. I don't want to go anywhere this morning. I just want to sit here and continue typing and drinking coffee, staying all nice and warm while listening to the rain pelting the roof and splashing off the eaves. The dogs show no interest in moving, either. They're curled up around me, three golden retrievers at my feet, snoozing through a lazy cold day...
You know what impresses me? It's the way artists--and I'm thinking primarily Impressionists here--capture the weather. Those vertical slashes of rain I mentioned above are borrowed from Van Gogh, who, to be fair, seems in turn to have borrowed them from Japanese prints. But think about it. Put yourself back to the time before anyone had seen rain like that, and then to suddenly have it revealed, on canvas, must have been a mind-blowing epiphany, don't you suppose?. I remember wandering into a bookstore in Cambridge and seeing an oil painting of a winter scene done in the simple folk-art manner of Grandma Moses. It depicted a village at twilight, with snowflakes represented as little white dots speckling the early dark. I looked at that painting and looked at that painting, never before having seen falling snow suspended and stilled. It was such a peaceful scene, and I have thought about that painting many times over the intervening years. It pleases me to think I might one day go and see it still hanging where I saw it so many years ago. It pleases me to think of that world remaining as I remember it, which is, truth be told, why I shall probably never go back.
