Cold Moon: On Life, Love, and Responsibility - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of five New York Times Notable Books of the Year, four national bestsellers, and seven off-Broadway plays. His essays for Time magazine and the PBS NewsHour have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and the Emmy, among others. In 2015, he won the Kenyon Review Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. He held the Briggs-Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing at Harvard. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at SUNY Stony Brook/Southampton.

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Excerpts from Cold Moon

Midnight on December 12, 2019—12/12/12—nearing the advent of the year of flawless hindsight. A bloodshot orange presents itself without notice on the northern horizon, just above the dark beach and the dark sea. This is the Cold Moon, variously identified as the Long Night’s Moon, the last before the winter solstice. My weathered mind flicks to my own winter solstice, the coming of my winter time of life. Through a three-windowed wall, I watch and brood.

Better to know where to go than how to get there. I wander from thought to thought, having learned but three things from my long night’s moon. I believe in life. I believe in love. I believe we are responsible for each other.

I doubt God every other day, yet I pray all the time. I pray without God. Prayer is the sound of longing. In the chapel of my longing, I pray.

Heraclitis was cute but full of it. You can never step into the same river twice? Sure you can. It's just that the river exists in a state of continuity, so what you step into is the motion that defines the river. But it's always the same river.
The point is that certain things are made of change, and the river is always true to the change that defines it. Life, too, is made of change.

If I were asked to create God—from scratch, I mean, the way Thomas Carlyle rewrote his history—I’d start with an ocean wave, and build from there. One wave would become several, then several billion, and the power and the glory would finally reveal itself in the cold comfort of the non-committal, calm and exploding sea. My kind of God.

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." That's Faulkner telling us that memory is an act of faith. I remembering you, you remembering me-these are acts of love driven by the imagination. We may not remember each other accurately. We may not remember each other at all. Yet we remember loving.