The sweetness of melting snow in the late afternoon and the confused birds that were beginning to suspect spring, twittering between the trees and the empty sky. I do love this quiet peace, and it makes me wish I could afford to buy a house somewhere north enough in New York that there's snow on the ground all winter. There's a stray cat in the alley. It's looking at me as I walk towards it. He wonders where I'm going, and I wonder where he's going. He keeps his distance, getting further away as I get closer. It's not very cold and the snow is already melting.
I'm thinking about some passages from Henry Adams, the 19th century historian who made fairly accurate predictions about the outbreak of World War I and the deleterious effects that mechanization and electricity would have on the American and global psyche. Adams really hated the age he lived in.
There's something so funny about people with that kind of temperament—the temperament that I share,1 frankly… that aristocratic temperament that sees everything as in-decline.
You could create a genealogy of historians and thinkers and poets who have seen their age as being a tarnished bronze age, going back hundreds and even thousands of years. If you took that genealogy seriously, there should be nothing left of humanity, logically; the decline would have declined towards nothing a long time ago.
I can't imagine being wise without some kind of dialectic between the conservative and liberal impulses or thoughts inside of a person. It does seem like a mental illness not to be able to understand that some things are getting better and some things are getting worse, but not uniformly.