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10.30.01
I'm trying not to worry about the newest terrorist threats.The weather has been insanely beautiful for weeks on end, and strangely out-of-sync with current events. What's it called in literature when weather serves as a metaphor for a character's frame of mind, or mirrors stormy events in the plot? This cold, clear, sunny autumn we're having seems rude, as if the sky is self-absorbed and uncaring. We need the empathetic climate of King Lear:
Since I was man,
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
Remember to have heard; man's nature cannot carry
The affliction nor the fear --
Our dogs are similarly oblivious, and bound through the leaves in exuberant bursts of sheer dog bliss.
My friend Henry recently asked me, "If you had your choice of being either (a) intelligent and talented but tortured and misunderstood - unable to reconcile all that you know of art, religion and science, or (b) Tippy the Dog, who knows nothing about nothing but enjoys life immensely, which would you choose?"
I'd be Tippy every time, the clincher being that Tippy doesn't know what he's missing.
Although Snoopy typed "It was a dark and stormy night" stories on top of his doghouse, didn't he? He must have known the plot power of sympathetic weather.
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