Stars and Pastures in February

Fortunately I'm on the mend from the cold. This evening, because it was a Friday and I was thinking of walk-running tomorrow, I didn't walk to the next train station. Instead, I stepped right into the one near the office and tried to read The Structure and Evolution of the Stars again, still hoping to finish it soon. Right now it is about white dwarf stars, in which the hydrogen has mostly been burned up except for a radioactive shell, which remains (if I've understood correctly) around a helium core in which the warmth is evenly distributed. But I did not focus well; I felt groggy and the work day was repeating itself in my mind.

In the morning, Berlin was bright and sunlit. So I neglected the book and I looked out the glass doors to absorb the landscape outside the S-Bahn. Apparently I am not too grown up to love a real-life Richard Scarry book, with a hundred human machines and habitations and activities, when it appears in front of me.

***

I think that trying to find new hopes and ideas, as we head into spring, is going well. There are verses of Milton's that I like to pair together and that seem to breathe this spirit:

"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

from Paradise Lost (quoted in Goodreads)

as well as

And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

from "Lycidas" (quoted in Bartleby)

I wish — just a little bit, because perhaps there are compensations — that in my life I'll reach the point again where winter does not sink so harshly into my mind just because of the weather.