Mar

“It’s an old impulse. To honor the dark with festivals of light, to battle it with same. Days are getting darker as we hurtle into winter, it comes at us faster every year. I am listening to sycamore leaves rustle down the sidewalk in front of my apartment. It’s somewhere in the forties. The wind is strong. Its voice changes this time of year, as though coming from darker lungs, and the leaves are at their loudest, last rattle before long quiet. In his fevered novel Malicroix, Henri Bosco describes this almost-winter moment of the year, “when the world was poised on a pure ridge,” balanced between two seasons, casting “a glance back at the aging autumn, still misty with its wild moods, to contemplate deadly winter from afar.” The misty mood is behind us. We’re looking now at something dark and wilder.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay