T.S. Eliot Knew Of What He Spoke

April is the cruelest month.

Bitter rain, bitter wind in the face, grey skies obliterating the spire of the Empire State Building.

It’s the weather where I feel most like myself. I wake up, hear the rain on the window, and think: Ahhhh. That’s more like it.

None of this harassing sun. None of this tormenting brightness. Wrap me up in grey and I feel like a million bucks. Perhaps it’s a leftover, or a cultural memory, or something like that … ancestors from County Mayo, a land of brown and grey.

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4 Responses to T.S. Eliot Knew Of What He Spoke

  1. CW says:

    You can have the cold rain Red. I’ll take the sunshine and flat 80 degree water for my April, thank you very much.

  2. Ash says:

    “April is the cruelest month”

    My old college roomate from the late 1980’s would agree with you. Once, he attempted to write a novel, and the opening two sentences of Chapter One went thusly (I memorized it):

    “I hate April. The entire month has a way of plopping down on you like a truckload of soot-grey, slightly warmed-over shaving cream.”

    I didn’t memorize the third sentence, but it made reference to your socks not drying out until May. We were poor students living in Chicago at the time, and did a lot of walking. As far as I know, my friend never wrote more than one chapter, but that first chapter was a doozy, involving an argument with an AI over why it hadn’t finished doing the taxes (this was a sf novel*), and culminating in a fight with an assassin in the protaganist’s apartment, which seemed to be based on our own.

    ===
    * Even since reading the chapter, I’ve waited patiently for the day you could really talk to a computer, so you could insult one and have it understand.

  3. Ash says:

    OK, I should have said “My old college roomate from the late 1980’s would agree with that.” You apparently like damp socks, or maybe you wear appropriate footgear to keep your socks dry…

  4. red says:

    Ash –

    I own a kick-ass pair of duck boots.

    Also, I have amazing fleece slippers which I wear about my chilly apartment. Keeps me cozy.

    I don’t know why – I just love the grey rainy weather. I’m a wee bit insane and my temperament tends towards the melancholy, I suppose – so when it’s grey – I don’t feel any pressure to cheer up.

    or something like that.

    “a fight with an assassin in the protagonist’s apartment…” Er – like Cato, in Pink Panther??

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