As November Ends

 

Photo by me, November 2024.

The early sunsets of late fall a week ago were spectacular ahead of rain and an upcoming colder weather pattern. The sky was impossible to ignore. It was fiery ribbons one day that twisted and streaked like the breathe of a dragon burning the earth in judgement.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Leaving Athens and heading toward home on Highway 316 was a drive into the ever morphing light.

Photo by me, November 2024.

You would have thought the world was coming to its end at the sun's farewell. The dragon breathe sky became an inverted Rothko painting.

The next day it was late, less than an hour before sunset, when I set out for a walk.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Around a lake I went and passed a foraging doe. To the east, the light reflected on a still lake as I crossed a bridge. By the time I had reached another side of the lake a few miles onward, the sun was long gone over the western horizon.

Photo by me, November 2024.

The last rays of sunshine beamed upward over the hills and across the water. It was a remarkable sight and I stood to look at it in the near darkness. The sun has set on this country, the decaying empire, after the morality play of the last election in which so many people sold their morals for whatever reason. No matter how dark it may become in the next few years as the light retreats, there will always be beauty to find and follow.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Photo by me, November 2024.

The rain came. Wednesday morning broke after a day and night of rainfall. In the half dark and half light of seven in the morning I looked at the water clinging to some of the roses in the rear of the house. They were more beautiful with the water droplets. The extra weight made the bushes bow as if recognizing the coming cold that was going to bring an end to the show of blossoms until next spring. Or I assume such, as one year I had roses blooming in January covered in snow.

Photo by me, November 2024.

Photo by me, November 2024.

In the subsequent cold that I had been waiting on for months, I planted tulip bulbs. I planted them in a couple of beds of existing tulips to fill in some of the spaces for next spring.

Photo by me, April 2024.

The tulips blooming last spring were a joy, but were too sparse for my liking. Next spring, no matter how the world may be, I want to at least have more joyful tulips. I should have twice as many next year.

Over four days I read Donna Tartt's 1992 novel, The Secret History. In 2013 I tried to read her novel, The Goldfinch, but I was not in the mood for it and put it down in the first chapter. The book felt like too much of a commitment at the time. With The Secret History I was absorbed and could not put it down with my feet on my desk and a throw wrapping my legs. It was her debut novel and at times that did show through in the writing as some passages were over-written and the ending drags on and on and on. The book needed a stronger editing hand for certain. By the epilogue, I did not much care what happened to the characters and skimmed some paragraphs. Getting to that point though, I did enjoy the novel. I will have to attempt The Goldfinch again.

I read somewhere that the character of the Classics professor in The Secret History, Julian, was possibly inspired by Claude Fredericks, who was a teacher at Bennington College. Claude unlike the character Julian was a gay man and was once the lover of poet James Merrill. Merrill died in 1995 of AIDS at age sixty-eight. For many years I have had a crush on the younger version of Merrill. He was a beautiful young man. I had not known that he was involved with Fredericks, but I was aware of his relationship with the much older Kimon Friar when he was a student at Amherst.

A young and captivating James Merrill.

James was an accomplished poet and Pulitzer Prize winner like Donna Tartt. Merrill was the son of the founding half of Merrill Lynch that shared his last name. Merrill for such a beauty, had odd taste in the looks of men that attracted him. Neither Fredericks or Friar were much to look at, but Merrill was very much in love with Friar as evidenced in his journals.

At the age of nineteen in 1945 when his romance with Friar is discovered by his mother, James Merrill writes to Friar, "There is one great lesson you can teach me, after teaching me to love. Teach me to suffer."

Despite not matching the physical description of the gay character Francis in The Secret History, I pictured Merrill in that role. Francis and Merrill were both from wealthy Northeastern families and I wanted that character to be attractive. Now that I am aware of his relationship with Claude Fredericks, it makes sense to me.  It makes even more sense for him to be that character when you consider that Kimon Friar was Greek and a teacher of Merrill's when they were involved.

Esquire Magazine 2019

While I am on the subject of Tartt and Bennington College, I have been listening to the podcast Once Upon A Time...at Bennington College. I am on episode five and was hoping for some insight into Tartt and her schooling at Bennington. So far it has been the Bret Easton Ellis show and people's obsession with him wearing Wayfarer shoes like it was a milestone in 80s fashion history. Tartt declined to be interviewed for the podcast and I am beginning to think that was a wise decision. Tartt, a fellow southerner born in Greenwood, Mississippi, has no social media, seldom does interviews and keeps a low profile away from the media circus. I cannot blame her.