Detail Diary, Vol #5

An autumn album

November 11 - 25, 2023

Dear friend,

In my last Detail Diary recap I speculated that those three weeks had captured the peak of Grenoble autumn. Well, autumn is a layered thing. As the first flush matures and wanes, other waves of color come, each species with its own clock, and they all collage together. I relearn this every year.

I’ve been thinking about cycles lately. How you only have so much space in the working memory of the self you bring to waking life, and how the things you keep in that finite garden wax and wane. Even the seeming fixtures of your identity or your routine will have their seasons, though the soil of the inner self still holds their roots. I’ve realized this before, and will realize it again. When I remember, I find more of both patience and presence for what’s in my garden now, and what I miss and might re-germinate.¹

This Detail Diary is an outgrowth of my reverence for the world, and as a writing practice, it has come and gone over the years. I’m so thrilled that it’s currently at the surface, and will keep it here as long as it seems to be in season.

Here is your usual reminder that this post is best viewed on the web or in the Substack app, unless your email provider manages to show all the photos and text in the email! Clicking on a Note will also take you to the browser to see its full text and photos.

(Nov 11 was supposed to be in the last recap but I didn’t manage to get it in.)

Actually I think that’s Saturn, missing its rings (if you zoom in you can see the holes where they were attached before someone made off with them)—plus, I should have remembered, Jupiter doesn’t tilt like that.

If you click and enlarge any photo, let this poplar-magpie ballet be the one.

I saw several other residents of southern France commenting on the cold snap that day. It’s not quite winter yet, but it’s coming.

(There are photos of mud and trees for #74 which may not show unless you click on the Note.)

1. I also periodically return to this passage from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, which is given in the context of spiritual life (and crucially is from the mouth of a devil who dispenses wisdom in reverse to a junior devil), but applies to being human in all senses, I think.

“Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal….As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.”