Flickering fires of nostalgia

I am a Buddhist, not a Christian. There's no particular reason for me to do or not "do" a Christmas celebration. Buddhists are usually mellow about telling one another what to believe or do. One major appeal of Buddhism when I joined nearly 40 years ago was that it offered no commandments or recipes for life, except the strictest of all: Cause and effect. Buddhists celebrate the New Year in the Asian fashion--starting fresh, making good causes for the year to come and so on. However, if I wanted to sing carols and so on, it would not be as they used to say "against my religion."

However, the holiday season sometimes finds me stiffening my resistance to sentimentality, simply in self-defense against overwhelming nostalgia and a sort of Holiday Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Case in point, a line from T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi caught me unawares and transported me back to the little theater holiday presentation where I first heard the poem recited--and heard recited many times because I was doing props for the show and attended all rehearsals and performances. It sent a shiver down my spine now as it had when I was 16 instead of 59. The words have a different depth to me now than they did then.

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'

The link below is supposed to have an audio clip of Eliot reading the poem, but I couldn't make it work. It's been one of those weeks. Maybe it will work for you. If not the whole text of the poem is there.
Eliot poem

What keeps occurring to me as I slowly re-read In Cold Blood is the interplay of truth and fiction. The rafts and rafts of observed facts in the book give it more heft and volume than Capote's more slender, totally fictional works. Sometimes reading fiction, you can actually pick out the true episodes (often the ones that don't fit) and sometime a whole forest of shards of glass that the writer picked up from real life and scattered on the page. Honestly, you can very often tell those "real" notes, because they stand up off the page. There's quite a lot of that in In Cold Blood. Odd holiday reading, but it somehow seems like a New Yorker article to me--which is part of its genius. The wealth of factual detail meshes so well with Capote's dreamy flights of lyrical speculation.

December 11 to December 24, 1977 I read:

Blind Ambition, The White House Years, John Dean

Vibrations: Improving your Psychic Environment, Daniel Logan


December 11 to 24, 2007 I read:


Greywalker, (Greywalker, Book 1), Kat Richardson
Kat Richardson

and
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
very slowly