Staring at the Water on a Sunday

It's been a pretty lazy weekend here, which feels nice. I was planning on having a lazy Saturday anyway, so when I woke up to gray and rainy weather yesterday it was essentially good news. Had a loungeful morning, read some & took a nap after breakfast. Later in the day I drove to Milford where I had dinner with my friend Stu (who I met at the Quaker meeting house here a few weeks ago) — homemade quesadillas along with corn on the cob & Dos Equis, highly satisfying. We drove back to New Haven to see a semi-staged performance of Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti at the recital hall on campus, which scratched an itch. Some very good music in there: every scene has either got a jazzy melodic hook to it, or else a well-calibrated, modest kind of poignancy that doesn't overdo it. The singers were charismatic; I like seeing young performers take on something a bit quirky.

Today I was riding my bike to the Quaker meeting (about a half hour away, substantially uphill) but had got a late start, and decided halfway there I wasn't going to make it on time. So I rode back home & watched SportsCenter for a while instead, gradually eating a grapefruit. I am no more spiritually uplifted, but I am aware of Albert Pujols's strained oblique muscle. And that they're preparing for some Indy car race in upstate New York today, which they're not planning to cancel despite the fact it's rainy and wet there too. You're all fools, I think, sucking on a quarter-grapefruit. You're all gonna get yourself killed doing that. Go slow, will you? I am lying on the couch wearing sweatpants.

I've gone to Quaker meeting I think five times here, maybe four; it's a lovely meeting house up by the Quinnipiac River, on top of a steep and nearly unbikable hill. The first time was Easter Sunday, and at the time there was an actual spiritual void it filled, and the silence was thrilling and important, and calming; and each successive time it's meant somewhat less. Quaker meeting is familiar to me from Swarthmore, where I'd gone to a couple of meetings; and it's as close to a well-fitting religion as I'm ever going to find, due to it being a kind Christianity where you just sit there without saying very much, and there's no overt belief system, or even specific God if you don't care for it. What's not to like? But, well, I'm not going to force it to be essential.

I'm reading James Agee's A Death in the Family right now, and one of the characters sums up an agnostic viewpoint that's so close to mine that it barely registered as interesting the first time I read it:

"I'm not exactly an atheist, you know. Least I don't suppose I am. Seems as unfounded to me to say there isn't a God as to say there is. You can't prove it either way. But that's it: I've got to have proof. And on anything can't be proved, be damned if I'll jump either way."

It's kind of comforting to know that if I phrased myself differently, my own ambivalent cluelessness would come across as southern folk wisdom instead.

"Could be that God has a plan for us, but seems unlikely to me. I could be at church, but can't I think this through just as clearly, more clearly even, at home? So I reckon I'll stay here on the couch till God in his wisdom visits upon us something representing a bit more proof. But quiet, they're back from commercials, now. Maybe they'll show some Pirates-Padres highlights. Wait, arena football? Hahh. Isn't anyone on this green earth gives a whit about that."