Friday Infatuation

John Muir

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." — fromTravels in Alaska (1915)


If you haven't watched it, you should tune in to the PBS special series of Ken Burns' America's Parks. It's a glorious paean to our country's wild and natural beauty, a call to preserve that beauty and an homage to those men and women whom I would call saints who wrote and fought for that preservation.  It's ironic that this radical government idea comes at a time when our whole country is agonizing over "socialism" and the role of government, whether good or bad. The series is a testament to what good government can do, namely preserve a natural environment essential to not just our lives but our souls.


(And I'm in love, currently, with John Muir, the writer and naturalist who is featured prominently in the special.)

My other infatuation is the movie Bright Star, that I saw last night. I went by myself and sat in the darkened theater, utterly transported by the story of the Romantic poet John Keats and his beloved Fanny Brawne. The movie was highly stylized and achingly romantic, and while I'm sure there are those who will believe it to be pretentious, I was in heaven. The cinematography was gorgeous and hearing Keats' poetry again, after so many years, made me want to memorize it.


Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
    Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
    Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
    Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
    Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
    Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
    Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.