a beginning
This newsletter mirrors my blog at https://jeffreymoro.com/blog.
I haven’t kept a regular blog for several years now. There are many reasons for this, many macro, others micro. The macro ones you know about: they’re all the same reasons you’ve felt distracted, on edge, tired for much of the past few years. At least, I suspect you have. If you’re the kind of person taking the time to read a blog post (a quaint medium: I just as well might write you a letter and tie it to a pigeon), then you share with me, I would venture, some values that are hard to come by these days. An appreciation for the art of a sentence. A desire to move slower rather than faster. A stubborn attachment to the past, not to repeat it, but to understand it and its relationship to the present. And a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to give the internet a hard reboot.
And then there are the micro reasons: an adjustment to a new job, and with it, new demands on my time and new expectations for my writing; a length of creative block; a sense of personal futility about the blog as a medium — this last one in particular weighed heavily on me, because for a long time, during graduate school, I found blogging a useful way to keep my writing muscles sharp, to circulate ideas that didn’t necessarily warrant a full elaboration into a formal piece, or simply to record — diaristically — thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And then the internet’s information ecosystem fell apart. Blogs became newsletters, locked behind yet another paywall; the social networks on which I relied to disseminate my posts became crowded out with hate and slop. Soon, many people stopped reading entirely. Writing always, to some degree, entails imagining one’s audience. It’s hard to do so when even the possibility of one seems harder than ever to reach.
Nevertheless — here we are. I am writing, and you are reading. I thank you for that, truly. I want to make this worth your while, so I want to tell you about a place:
At the edge of the Roman Agora in Athens, Greece, under the shadow of the Acropolis, stands an octagonal marble tower, festooned on each side with crumbling carvings of eight wind deities. It has many names: the Tower of the Winds, the Aerides, or the Horologium Kyrrhestes. It dates from the first century BCE. Despite the prominence given to the winds, its principal purpose was to keep time: windows carved into each of the eight sides shone light onto a sundial in the interior, and a water clock powered from a cistern on its side kept time when the sun was obscured. But the winds were not mere incidental decoration. The Tower of the Winds served an early meteorological function. A weathervane — now lost, suggested only by its mounting place — sat atop the structure, which a viewer could use in conjunction with the deity carvings to note the wind’s direction.
The carvings themselves, now worn with time, depict each of the wind deities as men of various ages, all winged, all carrying objects corresponding to the gifts — or maladies — they carry. Zephyrus, the western wind, appears as a beautiful youth bearing flowers, heralding the arrival of spring (and later, the indolence of summer). Boreas, the north wind, by contrast, is an older man dressed in warm clothes suitable to his bluster. For Athenians, as for many different cultures across the globe, the arrival and departures of different winds, each with their own qualities, kept time in their own way. They marked the seasons: not just the familiar four but also whole hosts of micro-seasons, times to grow and times to rest, times to fortify and times to relax — times long before the regular tick of Unix time, but under which we still live, if we only let ourselves notice them.
Here, in Baltimore, summer has broken through in all its swampy glory through what was otherwise a notably chilly spring. My backyard is full of bird chatter: finches, cardinals, robins, and swifts. It’s a time to begin, not again, but anew.
I’m committing myself to keeping this blog alive out of sheer stubbornness if nothing else. Biweekly, more or less — bits and pieces dug out from my research, small updates on my professional activities and otherwise. Thank you for reading.