A quiet night. Before Christmas, there was a pleasant trip up to Morpeth to see Merrie and Bennett – my gift from them turned out to be not only their own elderberry jelly, but one of Bennett's newly turned bowls, a beautiful and sensual piece of work in greens and golds. He hasn't been doing this for long, and I know he will create more complex things later – but already it is a bowl that has its own definite nature.
And today a Christmas day, slow and quiet during the day, then pleasant talk and stuffing myself with ham at Michael and Andrew's, with the other Andrew. (It's like those passages in the New Testament where the text says: with the other Mary... passages that give a startling sense of the concrete, of seeing vastly important things as they happen.)
And here at home, sleepy, the tree small but glowing with colored lights, and delicately ruthless neomedieval carols by Richard Rodney Bennett playing. A sense, after a glass or two or so of champagne and wine, after a quiet but satisfying day, of the deeply serious strength of this time of year: as existence shows its bare but still living branches, and the dark earth and moonless night show their natural power – a power that is always there, but is inevitably obscured by the confusion of surfaces and flashes that interrupt during the brighter and more social parts of the calendar.
These notes, these lights, seem to weave small patterns against the vast sky – but the patterns themselves are ancient, are echoes of the sky itself: they reflect something that reaches down through the core of winter, that touches the life that grows out of this coldest time, and starts again to take root....
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