I go walking in the neighborhood most days when it’s nice. The coming of spring this year has been even more welcome than usual for that reason.

When our schedules coincide–much easier to manage on the weekends–my wife Alice and I go walking together.

I walk mostly to gain stamina, listen to podcasts, and keep my weight down. (I’ve lost about 30 pounds in pandemic time and if I can lose 10 more I would be even happier.) I also walk to burn nervous energy that seems to accumulate in my mind, not my body; “brother mule” (as St. Francis called the body) these days seems to stay weirdly enervated, in a state of lassitude. Actually, my mind usually feels murky and enervated too, which does nothing to explain the store of nervous mental energy that finds me at about 2:30 a.m. every day. But I digress.

When I walk with Alice, she often suggests we vary from my usual regime of let’s-do-laps-and-feel-the-burn and take a left so we can walk down the road and not just around the cul-de-sac. It’s a grand idea for many reasons, and not just because it interrupts my looping. It’s a grand idea because the variety is good, and because about two blocks up the road there’s a home where the folks who live there have decorated their yard with splendid signs of all colors, shapes, and sizes.

I don’t remember whether the house had signs before the pandemic hit. Probably it had some. Alice will remember. But one of the odd ironies of pandemic time is that in all my mental murk some things are in much sharper focus than they were before. It may be something like what Walker Percy writes about in one of my favorite essays, “The Loss of the Creature”:

One can think of two sorts of circumstances through which the thing may be
restored to the person. (There is always, of course, the direct recovery: A student may simply be strong enough, brave enough, clever enough to take the dogfish and the sonnet by storm, to wrest control of it from the educators and the educational package.) First by ordeal: The Bomb falls; when the young man recovers consciousness in the shambles of the biology laboratory, there not ten inches from his nose lies the dogfish. Now all at once he can see it directly and without let, just as the exile or the prisoner or the sick man sees the sparrow at his window in all its inexhaustibility; just as the commuter who has had a heart attack sees his own hand for the first time. In these cases, the simulacrum of everydayness and of consumption has been destroyed by disaster; in the case of the bomb, literally destroyed. Secondly, by apprenticeship to a great man: one day a great biologist walks into the laboratory; he stops in front of our student’s desk; he leans over, picks up the dogfish, and, ignoring instruments and procedure, probes with a broken fingernail into the little carcass. “Now here is a
curious business,” he says, ignoring also the proper jargon of the specialty. “Look
here how this little duct reverses its direction and drops into the pelvis. Now if you
would look into a coelacanth, you would see that it—” And all at once the student can see. The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbooks are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and always humble before the thing; he doesn’t have much use for the equipment or the jargon. Whereas the technician is never vague and never humble before the thing; he holds the thing disposed of by the principle, the formula, the textbook outline; and he thinks a great deal of equipment and jargon.

I hope you will forgive Percy’s androcentric pronouns. I believe he wrote in good faith and were he alive today would aim to write less androcentrically–but that’s only one person’s judgment, of course. Still, the thought is worth thinking. What restores the world to us? What allows us to see our hand for the first time?

Maybe it wasn’t just pandemic time that made these signs so present to my mind and memory. I believe the signs are more profuse every day. I know that the people at the house are moving the signs around. I also know that today the light was especially beautiful, and the signs seemed to glow with meaning, admonition, encouragement. A yard full of sentence and solas. Messages from another planet, another home, for me.

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See you tomorrow.