In Boston again, for the second time in a month. Feeling the winter here cut through my coat collar reminds me of places even further north. Incidentally, I just came across this rambling bit, from a nondescript text file I left on my own desktop in November 2006.

There are not enough stars in Boston. Stars, which depending on your vantage point could resemble the icy tips of invisible stalactites or mutilated balls of burning gas floating impossibly through the black. Fortunately, we are very, very far, and the air outside is — without fail in this neck of Maine — very, very cold. So cold it feels like a different shade of cold every time I step outside, the combination of the stars and wisps of clouds and the dry, clear night eliciting a sensory amnesia, a short term memory loss brought on by feelings of metaphysical insignificance before the looming face of infinity above.

I want to record every drop of sensation in words, in calculable thought, in action. But what performance of a verb could possibly capture frost? Or the cruel bent of a tree branch? I can tell you it’s hardly cruel at all in the daylight, and that bodily ache of mine for a word or a sentence, a tome, a treatise on my right to be here, all but disappears after I’ve digested breakfast.

This is the time of day when more than just thought comes into the light: revelations; a remedy for hate in other people’s countries, or for love in mine. No, nothing nearly so important: whims; insights.

For a moment, words seem a delusion, a false celebration of our mastery of experience. Tapping on keys is an unlikely, maybe hopeless act of self-preservation, securing a nameless corner of humanity against the blank wall just beyond our crystalizing breath.

The critic T.E. Hulme hated romanticism, thought it mystical nonsense. But when I’m standing here, home but not home, the trees empty, having given their way to the freedom of spacious leaflessness, I wonder if he was just missing the point of his own insight:

By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic…You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

Here’s to spilt religion: futile metaphors and wordless mumblings: prayer, expression, and the failure of both; to leaves, trees, the grass and the birds; quiet despair, rambling exultation, and the faint vibrations of stars in the firmament, in the dark, on cold, cold nights.