Evening. Overcast sky. Cooling breeze blowing up Skull Creek from the south. The wind has been from the south for more than a week.
Here we were only on the fringe of Alberto, which in any case is not a significant weather system. Moderate steady rain that fell through last night ended this morning. I took my lunch and foul weather parka when I walked up to use the condo’s Internet, but did not need the parka.
I watched parts of a couple of baseball games, caught up on email, viewed some video links sent by friends, showered, then came back down to GANNET.
Dinner of freeze dry Santa Fe Chicken and Rice, accompanied by boxed red wine and John Luther Adams BECOME OCEAN followed by Handel’s MESSIAH. Sometimes only substantial music will do.
This was my first freeze dry dinner in a while.
Last week I ate ashore with Carol’s family and yesterday I biked to the supermarket and brought back among other things a prepared salad.
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A reader wrote after my most recent quote of Ecclesiastes 9:11 that it is romantic, but not the way the smart money bets. I have heard that before, but Ecclesiastes is not even slightly romantic, it is harshly realistic. Ask millions of farmers and fishermen who have worked hard and seen their efforts destroyed by weather. Ask 6,000,000 Jews who happened to live in Europe in 1940. Ask the middle class in Germany in the runaway inflation of the 1920s. It is a useful cultural myth that if you work hard, you will achieve your goals. It sometimes is even true. But Ecclesiastes knows that however hard you strive, however intelligent, however strong you are, you can still be destroyed by time and chance.
I have said that Ecclesiastes 9:11 is the greatest truth I have ever read.
The greatest strength is also Christian: to absorb the evil done to you without passing it on. A strength not often practiced by those who call themselves Christian. A strength that if I have ever achieved at all, took me more than half a century to do so.
Perhaps I am thinking of this because I was listening to THE MESSIAH.
I am not a Christian, but the religion has inspired some wonderful music to which I am about to return.
