Dear Brandeis community,

 

I have been up too late this week, and again up too early, burning the winter candle at both ends against the oncoming rush of the break, the sprint to the finish that characterizes these moments in schools. The edges of the days and their contents blur: the gym full of parents and kids watching Screenagers and thinking together; the gym full of preschoolers singing Hanukkah songs and building the light; the fog, the rain, the gifts and well-wishes, the greetings and goodbyes.

 

Into the haze of this week, Tablet’s large-format anachronism of a print magazine arrived. I was drawn to an article about Mongolia by Jesse Eisenberg, and opened it and left it open here on my desk, dropping in and out of his Millennial Woody Allen angst in the interstitial spaces of my days. He tells of visiting Mongolia with a friend who is closer to an acquaintance, of exploring its wide-open spaces as well as the ragged holes left in the lives of its inhabitants by the encroaching global economy. I wanted to write about Mongolia as a metaphor for the broad vistas of time away, but it is the wrong season; the oversaturated white taiga I picture holds none of the gauzy green and the gray of December in San Francisco.

 

Hanukkah is a festival of lights in a way that holds a deep human history in it, that transcends individual tradition—the history of campfires that hold back the night and define the edges of the visible and the known. It is a history of the days shortening and getting colder, and our human impulse to seek shelter, and warmth, and the company of loved ones. Where the light and dark intersect is the haze of these days for me, and a notion of the sacred—the touch of the familiar against the numinous emptiness.

 

This week has brought to mind for me the painting technique sfumato, one of the central modes of Renaissance painting, most famously visible in the blurred edges of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The word itself derives from the Italian fumo, or smoke, and that smokiness articulates well the wintering spirit of the week. I first learned of sfumato in an art history course while living abroad in Spain, and then saw the smoke of it crawling across the walls of galleries in the Prado and the Reina Sofia. I came back to it later via literature, reading Robert Duncan’s book Bending the Bow, his poems of the spirit and human experience. I will end there, with these lines from “The Fire (Passages 13)”:

 

The day at the window

the rain at the window

the night and the star at the window

 

            Do you know the old language?

            I do not know the old language.

            Do you know the language of the old belief?

 

Wishing you all winter breaks encircled by loved ones and light my friends, and touched, too, by the old beliefs that fog the edges.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan