Day 110: Things I like

Got the sadness tonight, the wailing blues, but determined not to be ruled by it, so instead here are some things that make me happy:

- When you open the coffee bag in the morning and the fresh, chocolatey aroma hits your nose and you feel like maybe you'll be able to make it through this day after all.
- Reading a novel and finding a line about a far off city twinkling in the sunlight, or a fabulous hidden garden, or a vast mountain range marching to the horizon, and getting a shock of realisation at the breadth of the world and how much magic and beauty there is waiting in every direction.
- That first spoonful of fudge brownie ice cream before it's become sickly when it's still gloriously rich and indulgent.
- Becoming aware of how your vision isn't passive, like light hitting plates behind your eyes, but something active and alert and living, a reaching out into your environment, an exploratory hand of sight sweeping the world, touching it, caressing it; a meeting of self and other, at the mystical liminal boundary where the two merge. And then catching someone's eye and sensing your alert gaze entwining with their alert gaze. Feeling all the mechanisms of defence and caution you both erect to protect those pathways through the eyes that lead back down into the depths inside you, but sensing the possibility that these mechanisms could, perhaps only for the briefest of moments, be dropped.
- The first days of autumn when the breeze comes hard and cold and the leaves begin to turn and the air is clear and the light is fading and it is all so beautiful, so delicate, so doomed.
- Miles Davis and red wine by candlight.
- That opening paragraph of The Pale King, starting, "Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust," and ending with the line, "We are all of us brothers."
- Pretty much any camera movement in a Scorcese film.
- The listening booth scene from Before Sunrise.
- The sensitive, stubborn humanity of Kurt Vonnegut.
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki, how he writes courageous and complex female protagonists matter-of-factly, as if it would be ludicrous for other male writers not to all do the same, which of course it is. How he refuses to allow his antagonists to meet grizzly ends getting the comeuppances they deserve, because in real life there are no real villains, no monsters, only human beings each with their own vast internal universes whom we should treat with respect and courtesy and love.
- That video doing the rounds on social media about the importance of the 60s American show Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood, what Rogers did for race relations, having a black policeman move in as his neighbour, inviting him round in a scene when Rogers was bathing his feet in a paddling pool on a hot day, asking the black policeman if he wanted to take his shoes and socks off and join him, which the policeman did, and the two men sat there, white and black feet naked and almost touching, the scene quietly telling children across the US and the world that this was normal, a million times normal, that, to borrow from The Pale King, we are all of us brothers. And for me now to think about this in days that grow dark with portents, as demagogues seek to divide us, and to remember that art can change the world, that there is always a choice between love and hate, always only one choice that matters, and that we are free to make it in every moment in which we still exist.