01.06.04 - 8:28 a.m.

It's snowing. I know this because I saw snowflakes on the window as I was fixing my morning coffee, lingering a moment before melting. This morning is one of those deep blue twilit mornings, an intense and meditative color, with more than a sliver of silver or gray to soften the color. In the foreground, my grandmother's Christmas cactus is blooming - as it has been for two weeks now - with at least three dozen huge, hot pink flowers. The sweet pea I gave my grandmother is about to finally meet its end, though some of it is still green. I'm forcing daffodils in a bright yellow pot, and found that last year's narcissus were trying to grow again this year when I went to take the stones for the daffodils, so I suppose I'm forcing narcissus, also.

And just like that, the blue is gone. The sun must have risen, for the sky and the receding landscape, the snow-swathed, cloud-lathed distance and the usual cityscape in the immediate few blocks are now gray rather than blue - completely gray. It's still a meditative color, a color you half-drown in, a color of silence, hot tea, warm blankets, all the austerities of winter, but it is no longer desperately lovely, intensely colored, as the silver-blue morning was. I hate that those early moments never last.

Wait - the light changed again. It's blue once more, deep and rich, a color that shouldn't be found in nature, but clearly in. Not sapphire, nothing so bejeweled, but deep, rich gray/silver-blue. The sky is, of course, covered in clouds, and there's no explanation for the changing light, or at least, none that I can come up with, now that my initial though has been shown false and -

- just like that, it's gone.

---

Much later now, and it's still snowing, though less than i was for a bit. There's snow on the tops of the buildings, a bit of snow on the street, snow on the grass. Saturday and Sunday, the daytime high was seventy degrees, or thereabouts, and I had to turn on the a/c for brief bouts in the car. Today, much colder, and tonight, moreso, with temperatures hovering around 11 degrees.

I really need to get back to work, but there was one other thing I wanted to "save" here, a link to an essay by Paul Graham about heresy that I picked up from someplace else:

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

It's quite a long essay, and it took me two different sittings to get through the text (not so much because it was difficult as because my time is limited to bite-sized, easily digestible little chunks by wicked forces outside my control (aka, myself)), but it was worth reading. The excerpt that inspired me to cut and paste to send to myself for further consideration that evening (which didn't happen, since I'm accessing it from my sent items folder rather than hotmail) follows:

The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.

When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.

i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto. I like that (though the Fight Club reference, not so much). I like it alot. Self-expression does not and should not mean some endless spewing of our every random thought, our most base urges, the secret half-dreams that crawl into the space between waking and sleeping as you lay in the dark and try to empty your mind so you can fall asleep, already. Certainly, we don't need to regurgitate every half-chewed opinion back into the world so much as we need to be able to think them. If you can question assumptions - your own, as well as other peoples - without feeling the attention-whore's need to smear your thoughts across a billboard or the self-righteous ectopic bastard's wholly ego-centric need to enlighten the world - if you can pick your battles, you'll come out ahead.

I pick some of my battles, but not all of them. Maybe I need to pick a half-dozen fewer, I don't know. It's something to think about and work on, even though this wasn't a self-improvement sort of piece. Except for the author's proposal to think up some heresies, now and then. I've already blathered enough today, though. Maybe tomorrow for the heresies.