Salvatore Quasimodo Day -- 2026 !

 “i sonnecchianti ciclamini . . . a schiudere i loro corallini petali”
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[“the slumbering cyclamen . . . unfold their small coral-hued petals”]

Today’s the 125th anniversary of the birth – on August 20, 1901, in Modica, Sicily – of the Nobel-honored poet Salvatore Quasimodo.  Let’s commemorate – and celebrate!  I’ll do so here by printing, then cerebrating on and luxuriating in, “L’Aurora” [“The Dawn”] – Quasimodo’s self-described “primo lavoro poetico”[“first poetic work”].

Written probably in 1915 – so at age thirteen or fourteen – and first published in the journal Humanitis (Bari, 13 May 1917), “L’Aurora” does not have the era-defining pure language of Quasimodo’s 1930s hermetic verse or compelling gravitas of his more civilly and socially engaged post-WWII poems.    

That said, “L’Aurora” charms.  As with most of Quasimodo’s youthful poetry, there’s “verbal exuberance” and “entrancing energy,” in the words of Marco Sonzogni, one of the translators (along with Gerald Dawe) of The Night Fountain (Arc Publications, 2008), a bilingual selection of Quasimodo’s early work and the book in which I first read the poem.  

In addition, “L’Aurora” has lots of Sicily in it!  The island’s atmospherics, birds, colors, and flora – you’ll see! – anchor and enliven the poem.  That there’s lots of such detail is not surprising given that Quasimodo wrote the poem while attending secondary school (similar to American high school) in Messina, having to that point always lived in Sicily, including, as a young child, the Ionian coastal town of Roccalumera.  

In addition, “L’Aurora” thrills with plenty more, including an allusion to Dante and – oh how au courant this summer – a Homeric epithet!  

In short, while “not yet mature poetry” – those the words of Quasimodo’s son Alessandro, in his foreword to The Night Fountain,“L’Aurora” shows more than enough lexical skill and poetic instinct to justify multiple readings – and a place in your heart.  Here’s the 14-line (thus a kind of sonnet) poem, first in Quasimodo’s Italian and then an English translation [modified from Sonzogni and Dawes]:

L’AURORA

Bianca, fugace, la nebbia svapora 
nell’aria pura.  S’indora l’oriente, 
s’effonde la luce: ecco l’aurora. 
L’ultimo grido il gufo alla fuggente 
tenebra getta e nel silente ombroso 
bosco dispare.  Incomincia l’amore 
allegri trillano fra l’odoroso 
aere dei giovani arbusti in fiore 
gli uccelli.  Si drizzan sullo stelo superbi 
i sonnecchianti ciclamini, 
aspettando impazienti che nel cielo 
turchino, luminoso l’astro d’oro 
sorga a schiudere i loro corallini 
petali.  È la rosea aurora: al lavoro!

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THE DAWN

White, fleeting, the mist evaporates 
in the clear air.  The east turns gold, 
the light pours out: here’s the dawn. 
The owl casts its final cry into the fleeing
darkness and vanishes into the silent,
shadowy woods.  Love begins
birds sing joyously amidst the fragrant 
air of the young flowering shrubs. 
Proudly, the slumbering cyclamen
straighten on their stems, waiting 
impatiently for the luminous
golden star to rise in the deep blue sky
and unfold their coral
petals.  It’s the rosy dawn: to work!

I love this poem!  May I share a few thoughts about it?

The poem’s opening two sentences set the scene, and do so, I think, with a sweet sweet syllabic / sonic rhythm, with a twist at the end.  Follow along, if you please: the first line has three clauses; the first and second contain (in Italian, natch) a single three-syllable word, while the third has two three-syllable units – an article-noun combination followed by a single word.  Further, in all those three-syllable words or word-combos, the second syllable is stressed,  Here is that first line, with pronunciations (using English phonetics) in brackets:   

Bianca, fugace, la nebbia svapora 

[ Bee-AHN-kah, foo-GAH-che, la NEHB-byah zvah-POH-rah ]

This is a nice steady rhythm, and it continues in the second line, with a combined prepositional phrase that’s – you guessed it –  another three syllable lexical unit, with the accent on the second syllable –  

nell’aria

[ nel-LAH-ryah ]

– with the sentence then ending withe something that, lexically and sonically, is completely different:

pura.

[ POO-rah. ]

Coming after five consecutive three-syllable words or word-combos (each with the stress on the second syllable) the final word of the sentence – “pura” [“POO-rah”] – is and sounds more concise (two syllables) and sharp (accent on the first syllable).  The word, to me, rings like a bell, and by its sound reinforces the the word’s meaning of “clear.”  I think Quasimodo purposefully ended the sentence this way, for a good poetic reason. 

The syllabic fun of “L’Aurora” continues in the second sentence.  It begins mid-second line with a pronoun-verb followed by an article-noun, each of which – natch – has three syllables with -- natch again! -- the stress on the second,  and then, in the poem’s third line, continues with yet another pair of – you know it! – three-syllable / second-syllable accented lexical units (a pronoun-verb followed by an article-noun):  

 . . . S’indora l’oriente, 
s’effonde la luce:

 [ . . . Seen-DOH-rah lor-YEN-tah,
sef-FOHN-deh la LOO-cheh: ]

all of which sets up, after the the colon, the culminating:

ecco l’aurora

[ EH-koh low-ROH-rah.]

The“ecco” here is marvelous.  First, the stressed first-syllable and hard “c” of  “ecco”, after all the contrasting three-syllable word combinations that precede it, neatly matches the sonic twist at the end of the first sentence.  

More than that, is there a better word, in Italian or maybe anywhere, than “ecco”?  The word’s formal meaning, perfectly applicable in “L’Aurora”, is “here is”.  But it can also – and does here – serve as a cue to pay attention. Yes, Quasimodo is telling us not only is dawn here, but dawn is the subject of the poem, and we should pay heed.  Ecco! Ecco! Ecco!  

Quasimodo then presents a lovely image: a night owl’s final cry and both how-it-happens but also kind-of-magical retreat into the trees’ quiet shadows.  There may be a symbolic element to the vanishing: in Sicilian folklore, the owl is sometimes considered a bird of ill omen; in the poem, as the day begins, that bird has flown.   

Next comes a sentence that, in the Italian, extends over parts of four lines, and, with its birds singing in the  air made sweet by young flowering shrubs presents yet more naturalistic details – but which begins with, at least on first reading, may seem like a jarring abstraction:

Incomincia l’amore   

[ Love begins ]

While different from the naturalistic particulars that both precede and follow it, the abstraction “Love begins” works because it sincerely reflects, and is a simple declaration of, Quasimodo’s understanding of life’s passion at daybreak.  Hearts swell when day begins; the dawn is ardent.  Thus, this declaration,  unconnected by formal punctuation or grammar to the remainder of the sentence: a poem after all is a poem: the “rules” need not apply.    

Next come the poem’s key lines, which contain its most compelling and complex image.  In these lines, Quasimodo presents a compound-complex sentence of three clauses (both in the original and translation here) across part or all of six lines, including its final one. It’s an eyeful, but oh so great:

 . . .   Si drizzan sullo stelo superbi 
i sonnecchianti ciclamini, 
aspettando impazienti che nel cielo 
turchino, luminoso l’astro d’oro 
sorga a schiudere i loro corallini 
petali.  

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[ Proudly, the slumbering cyclamen
straighten on their stems, waiting 
impatiently for the luminous
golden star to rise in the deep blue sky
and unfold their small coral-hued
petals. ] 

 O I love these lines! There is first, in the beautiful Italian, the alliterative zz’s and ss’s at the start of the sentence, and then, of course, sonnecchianti ciclamini, a word-combination of eight syllables that is oh so wonderful in the layrnx, on the tongue, and in the air.  If you need to, please copy-and-paste those two words into a site that pronounces foreign languages.  Bella, yes? 

I love too the use of l’astro d’oro [the golden star] instead of the more pedestrian – “il sole” [the sun].  Quasimodo’s more lofty term is not only more poetic but also infuses a sun-worshiping vibe that I dig.  The term also, especially with the added ‘luminoso” [luminous], energizes the image.  What with the luminous gold appearing in the oh so sensuous “cielo turchino” [deep blue sky], Quasimodo shocks us with sparkling color.  And to all that Quasimodo then adds the cyclamen’s unfolding coral petals.  Deep blue, luminous gold, and coral.  Oh là là: what a palette of colors!  

Cyclamen is native to Sicily, so its appearance here is another detail of the island’s flora and fauna in the  “L’Aurora”.  But the coral colored petals, I suggest, has important symbolic value too. In Sicily, coral – the sea-dwelling animal / substance, and by extension the color – has a deep traditional / cultural history as a symbol of protection, life, and good luck.  How deep is the tradition?  Consider this: in Antonello da Messina’s San Gregorio Polyptych (1473), Sicily’s early Renaissance painting masterwork, a kind of Mona Lisa for the island –  and which alas in August 2026  was stolen (!) from a Sicilian museum – features in its center panel a baby Jesus wearing around his neck, as protective charm or apotropaic amulet, a small red coral pendant! 

 

I believe that in “L’Aurora”, Quasimodo’s  “Corallini / petalli”, appearing as the day begins, has the same same protective / apotropaic role.   

And there’s still more!  As other have pointed out, Quaismodo’s six lines about the straightening on the stem, petal-unfolding cyclamen were plainly borrowed from a similar image in Dante’s Inferno.  Here are the relevant tercets (lines 127-132) from the Inferno’s second canto, in Italian and English (the latter by John Ciardi):

Quali fioretti dal notturno gelo
chinati e chiusi, poi che ‘l sol li ‘mbianca,
si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,. 

tal mi fec’ io di mia virtude stanca,
e tanto buono ardire al cor mi corse,
ch’i’ cominciai come persona franca . . . 

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As flowerlets drooped and puckered in the night
Turn up to the returning sun and spread
Their petals wide on his new warmth and light –

Just so my wilted spirits rose again
And such a heat of zeal surged through my veins
That I was born anew . . . 

[Alternatively, and perhaps more directly (if abbreviated), the Hollanders’ translation: “As little flowers, bent and closed / with chill of night, when the sun / lights them, stand all open on their stems, / such, in my failing strength, did I become.”

Of course, Quasimodo in “L’Aurora” does not explicitly use the awakening cyclamen as a simile for his own renewed confidence and energy, as Dante does with his morning flowers.  But doesn’t Quasimodo’s  unspoken but surely recognized-by-many allusion to Dante’s lines and simile here surely make that same connection happen without being obvious about it?  I certainly say it does.  The cyclamen’s straightening and unfolding here corresponds precisely to Quasimodo’s – the poet-speaker’s – renewed creative focus and strength as the day begins.  

There’s then the poem’s final sentence.  It begins with a declaration: 

È la rosea aurora:  

[ It’s the rosy dawn: ]  

That must be an allusion to Homer’s oft-used epithet, right?   In that regard, when Quasimodo decades later published his translations of selections from The Odyssey – Dall’Odissea (Mondadori, 1951) -- 

 

– a half-dozen of the excerpts included, you will not be surprised to learn, “Aurora dalle dita di rose” [“Rosy-fingered dawn”], to quote the words Quasimodo used!  In “L’Aurora”, the use of the Homeric term is both a convincing detail of how it actually was, and a reminder of Quasimodo’s s familial and cultural Siculo-Greco identity: his paternal grandmother was Greek, and of course Sicily was central to Magna Gracea.

 Finally, there comes in the last line the concluding clause, after the colon:

al lavoro!

[ to work! ]

Explication isn’t needed here. Let’s just salute the enthusiastic vigor of youth, and the poet’s embrace of, his dedication to, the task at hand! 

And salute also today, on the anniversary of his birth, Salvatore Quasimodo’s marvelous “primo lavoro poetico” [“first poetic work”].

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Harry Crosby Day

Today’s the 128th anniversary of Harry Crosby’s birth, on June 4, 1898.  And so today I . . . , well, not so much celebrate but commemorate the date, given that the focus here is on . . . death.  

Death, and suicide, were a central focus of Crosby’s life, easily seen by even the most basic review of his biography (he died at age 31, in December 1929, in a murder/ suicide (or double-suicide), of/with his mistress) and writings (see, for example, his prose-poem “Sun-Death”(in 1929’s Mad Queen), originally titled “Hail : Death !” when first published in a variant version).

Crosby’s obsession with death/suicide is, for me, deeply unsettling and uncomfortable, even awful. The obsession contrasts sharply with much that was invigorating and inspiring in his life, including to him, such as his devotion to and championing of poetry, writing, and books (reading, collecting, and publishing), or his deep passion for many people and things of this world, as shown in many passage of his diary (see Shadows of the Sun, Black Sparrow Press, 1977).  He loved many women and men, and his diary recounts many moments of awe and wonder, both grand and intimate, in his years in Paris and associated travel. 

 Crosby’s attraction to / need for death probably arose from, or was super-charged by, from the crucible / psychological scrambling of his World War I service, including at Verdun, particularly the November 22,1917 incident in which a shell obliterated the ambulance he was driving (and seriously wounded his passenger) but somehow left him physically unharmed.  The War clearly impacted him profoundly, and  never left him.  As he wrote in February 1925, after having finished Les Croix de Bois [Wooden Crosses], Roland Dorgelès’ moving novel,  “ . . . above all else we who have known war must never forget war.  And that is why I have the picture of a soldier’s corpse nailed to the door of my library.”

Morris Ekstein, in his Rites of Spring (1989), suggests the war was for Crosby an escape from what he saw as the dreadful dull life of Boston’s elites, and that the war’s “pervasive horror” became “ a stimulus . . . to personal imagination and inwardness an avenue to a new and vital realm of activity.” 

Gregory Wolff, in his seminal biography, suggests that Crosby’s focus on death in part pre-dated the war, and, in the Afterword when the book was republished, describes “the mystery of his suicide” and says Crosby was the “willing prisoner of his announcement that he would control his end, die when and how he chose.”  See Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, 1976 / 2003).   Of course, Crosby, again to judge by his diary, was in the last years of his life also a heavy drinker and regular user of  opium, perhaps resulting from, and/or reflecting, deep psychological depression.  

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Given his obsession with death, it comes as no surprise that Crosby, in his seven or so years in Paris, occasionally visited the city’s famous cemeteries, as documented in his diary.  Once he visited, on the same day (April 4, 1925) both Charles Baudelaire’s grave in Montparnasse and Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise.  He also visited the Catacombs.  

(Side note: for a deep-dive into the continuing vitality of Paris’cemeteries, click-thru for Peter Ross’s well-done article in Smithsonian Magazine, November 2025).  

To me, the most interesting aspect of Crosby and Paris cemeteries involves a little known graveyard he happened upon in late 1923, while walking with his wife Caresse in the Bois de Boulogne (the Boulogne Woods), a large public park on the city’s western edge that also had a well-known horse racetrack that they frequented (both to race their horses and to bet on others).  Known as the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp, it became a favorite place for him, and the “story” here, traced from nearly twenty diary entries spread over the following five years set in or which reference the cemetery, is fascinating.  It shows well Crosby’s sensibilities, particularly (and obviously) his intense obsession / identification with death and place, but also his love of the authentic both in locales and people (here, the Roux, an elderly couple who served as the graveyard’s caretakers).  Best of all, the story, such as it is, can be told in Crosby’s words, and should be – and as such also serves as an exemplar of his observational skills, attention to details, and poetic diary writing.  

Here then are the relevant excerpts from his diary (with bracketed explanatory text added for context, plus a few historic photos of the cemetery, such that I could find):

1923

    December 18.  A long walk in the Bois [de Boulogne] and we came upon a stone house half-hidden by the trees, a house with a garden enclosed by a stone wall and guarded by a great iron gate.  A handful of silver to the old crone and the gate was swung open.  The Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp (had never heard of its existence) and we wandered among the graves, and the grass was tall and unkept and weeds everywhere and moss growing upon the wall and tombstones all leaning awry and by our side the aged crone mumbling and muttering.  With her lean forefinger she indicated the grave of a danseuse du roi [King’s dancer].  Cypress trees grouped in a corner and the place overrun by cyclamen.  A real burying place.  We must be buried there.

    Christmas and for me a purple handkerchief (“and all that there is of beauty in me to give”) and the day is very clear and cold and after prayers at the Madeleine [La Madeleine, presumably] and after luncheon at the H’s where everyone drank hot punch from a great wassail bowl, we walked out to the Bois [de Boulogne] to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp where the old woman greeted us.  The Cimetière and the Soul.  Dead leaves and the frost on the ground and the sentinel fir tree watching over the dead.  Over the top of the stonewall a red-gold winter sun had almost set.  The air was cold and damp and in the underbrush we saw a leaning tombstone with an archaic urn carved upon it.  Nearby a simple stone cross enclosed by four low stone pillars these linked together by a rust-corroded chain.  Among the trees a white goat browsed and under the dark wall.  Soul in Eternity dreaming and praying prayers into the departing Sun.  It was dark when we reached Paris . . . . 

 

1924

    October 16.  Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp; entangled foliage, gravestones leaning awry, moss-covered stone walls,   [¶]   Perhaps it is here I shall kill myself.   [¶]   Must live in colors.  A red-gold sun flames westward with my inmost color-prayers (“et leurs cendres reposent dans la même urne” [“and their ashes rest in the same urn” – an unattributed quotation from Ovid, Metamorphoses]

    Christmas and the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and orchids and gardenias on the grave of the danseuse du roi.  The Gate to the Sun.
        
1925

    March 16.  [At the Escorial, in Segovia, Spain] . . . the gloomiest part was the descent into the crypt . . . where lie the buried Kings of Spain, down a long granite staircase, into the small octagonal burial-vault built directly under the high altar of the church . . . . Black sarcophagus and the empty tomb of Alphonse XIII . . . and how many times must he be haunted by this chamber of horrors.  How different this chamber which oppresses, which smothers, from the sunshine and moonlight and chaste disorder of the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.       
        
    October 31.  Gold and red and brown are the leaves on the ground and it is a gray day and our black Dom Luco gallops out to the post (Casaque Grixe, Croix de Malte Rose, Toque Noire) and twenty-two horses ran and we were twenty-second and afterwards to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.     

  
    Christmas.  And C is still away and it is a sombre grey day and out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp—one strong flame into the red-gold Sun.  And a gift to the Roux (they were there before I was born) and a glass of wine with them and there was the dog and the parrot and the white goat. 

1926

    May 24.  The Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.  Chequered sunlight and prayers and I read the Rubaiyat sitting against a tree trunk and there were twin trees upgrowing in oneness from a humble grave and their branches were interlaced and there were the lichened walls and the dense foliage and the moss-covered tombstones lean awry (like love-thoughts leaning in the brain) and there were prayers into the Sun (my soul a fountain playing into the Sun, gushing sunthoughts into the Sun).

    June 29.  [. . .] . . . and to the  Cimetière after supper and we ran Narcisse [the Crosby’s whippet]—a black arrow through the long grass . . . .
    
    July 4.  [In Massachusetts] More of Symons [The Symbolist Movement in Literature (expanded/revised 1919 edition)] – Léon Cladel who (like E.E. Cummings) employs ‘oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very shape of his accents!’ and ‘l’âme de  Léon Cladel était dans un constant et flamboyant automne’ ["Something of the colour and fever of autumn is in all he wrote.”]  This is me and my Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and my red-gold sun. 

    July 11.  [In Massachusetts] The Beach again at noon and I was bored and C. was terribly bored and I thought of the Cimetière . . . .
            
    July 31.  [In Siasconsent, Massachusetts] . . . of all places the most dreary. [ . . . ] After supper C and I and the mother-in-law to the Cinema and it was disgusting, especially the audience, and there was rowdyism among the children . . . for whom this damn country seems to be run and how the place smelt, stank rather, of bananas and cococola and ice-cream.  Resolved to become a Persian.  Thank Christ (if the Sun-God is willing) a month from to-night we should be back in Nineteen Rue de Lille.  [ ¶ ]  Before supper to-night holding an orange-blossom cocktail towards the red sun, the red-gold knowledge of the color of my burning shoe into the remoteness of my soul.  Thank you O Sun and Prayers and Aeolus and Green and Gold and the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.

    November 13.  To the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and the Roux present us with a “canard” (nourished on corpses?) and it was wonderful to see the pleasure they got from giving us this gift and there were Prayers . . . . 

 

1927

    May 11.  To the Montparnasse Cemetery to get our gravestone and in a taxi I took it out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp . . . .

    December 25.  Christmas for the Christians but for Sun-Worshippers the Birthday of the Sun and I walked out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and there were skulls lying in a heap (they are rearranging things) and I moved our gravestone from the chicken yard to a place of security under a fir tree and I gave the Roux a hundred francs and we drank together Benedictine from my flask and I fed an apple to the goat . . . .  

1928

    First Day of the Year.  [. . .] . . . and out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp where we found the frightening queer old Madame Roux wandering among the graves like someone walking in her sleep (c’est-il vrai Monsieur [is it true Sir]) and Narcisse went sniffing into the Invisible Sun and there were strange goings on—graves being rearranged and six tombstones have disappeared and we went away . . . .
        
    May 31.  [returning from Versailles] . . . and it began to rain a rain of stars and on the way home we stopped at the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp to get our gravestone and to say goodbye to the Roux (too disgusting of the park commissioners to destroy the walls and to put all the skulls and skeletons in one common grave—I am furious with them especially as I had offered to pay for the preservation of the walls) . . . . 

 And so the story ends -- the cherished almost forgotten cemetery taken down by the park commissioners, with Crosby -- understandably and even, it seems, justifiably -- furious at the action, with his dreamed-of final resting place vanished.

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the painting in the yard . . .

Well well well

beauty

and the poetic

endure: 

the backyard Bruce Conner

(aka HOMAGE TO JAY DE FEO, by Anonymous) 

nearly 20 years (!) here on-site, 

adjacent fence-post reinforced, 

and

most wonderfully: 

frame still solid (recently adorned with a small sun-mirror at its center) 

and

a few teeny bits of painted canvas 

still holding 

at the vertical edges 

all with 

a marvelous seasonal over-grow

of 

wild nasturtiums and purple cineraria

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For the back-story:

click-thru for the very elegant and informative

2011 essay by poet-editor Garrett Caples,

and see also

the final chapter (“Bruce Conner”) of independent curator and writer Jordan Stein’s 

very rich Rip Tales (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2021), 

and 

Rudolf Frieling, “Bruce Conner’s Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes,”

in

It’s All True (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016)

at pages 325-326.

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Sigurd Olson Day !

 “There is a sense of adventure and aliveness about the hour of dawn.

  Trees are more sharply etched, horizons more distinct, 

sensations more vivid than at any other time of day.”

 --- Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness (1958), page 282 

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Sigurd F. Olson was born on this date in 1899 (the 19th century!) and died in 1982 -- but through his work, particularly his books, lives on and should be -- as is hereby done right here, right now -- celebrated.

Olson was an environmentalist and writer with deep ties to what is now known as the Boundary Waters wilderness area, straddling the northern Minnesota / Canada border.  In his day it was known as the Quetico Superior; Olson first visited and fell love with it in his early 20s, and was an almost constant presence until, about 60 years later, he died there while snowshoeing.  

Olson’s books typically contain short chapters each of which focus on some aspect of the wilderness, blending observations with personal emotion and, often enough, broader perspectives – all shaped by a most admirable sensitivity and way of thinking (see, for example, the quotation at the top of this celebration).  

Every place in this world, or at least every wilderness, should have a Sigurd F. Olson, and I suppose some have (thinking for example of John Muir and the Sierra or, more recently, Edward Abbey and the Utah Canyonlands).   

 

The Singing Wilderness (1958), Olson’s first book (he published eight others in his lifetime), is organized by a series of short chapters tied to the seasons.  Each chapter is a kind of gem, and some astonish. 

In particular, I will never forget the chapter on the Northern Lights, with his description of ice-skating at night on a totally snow-free clear frozen miles-long lake, the windless surface mirroring the sky’s awesome aurora such that, ultimately, he – well, here’s an excerpt:

The lights of the aurora moved and shifted over the horizon.  Sometimes there were shafts of yellow tinged with green, then masses of evanescence which moved from east to west and back again.  Great streamers of bluish white zigzagged like a tremendous trembling curtain from one end of the sky to the other.  Streaks of yellow and orange and red shimmered along the flowing borders.  Never for a moment were they still, fading until they were almost completely gone, only to dance forth again in renewed splendor with infinite combinations and startling patters of design.   

The lake lay like a silver mirror before me . . . .   As far as I could see, the surface was clear and shining . . . . [ . . . ] . . . there had been no wind or snow to interfere, and the ice everywhere was clear—seven miles of perfect skating, something to dream about in years to come.  

Hurriedly I strapped on my skates . . . and in a moment was soaring down the path of shifting light which stretched endlessly before me. [ . . .]  As I sped down the lake, I was conscious of no effort, only of the dancing lights in the sky and a sense of lightness and exaltation.   

Shafts of light shot up into the heavens above me and concentrated there in a final climactic effort in which the shifting colors seemed drained from the horizons to form one gigantic rosette of flame and yellow and greenish purple.  Suddenly I grew conscious of the reflections from the ice itself and that I was skating through a sea of changing color caught between the streamers above and below.  At that moment I was part of the aurora, part of its light and of the great curtain that trembled above me.   

Those moments of experience are rare.  Sometimes I have known them while swimming in the moonlight, again while paddling a canoe when there was no wind and the islands seemed inverted and floating on the surface.  I caught it once when the surf was rolling on an ocean coast and I was carried on the crest of a wave that had begun a thousand miles away.  Here it was once more—freedom of movement and detachment from the earth.  

 Down the lake I went straight into the glistening path, speeding through a maze of changing color – stroke – stroke – stroke – the ringing of steel on ice, the sharp, reverberating rumbles of expansion below.  Clear ice for the first time in years, and the aurora blazing away above it.     

Me o my.  Happy Birthday anniversary, Sigurd F. Olson!

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