A Certain Slant of Light

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

-Emily Dickinson

In the early years of being a teenager, I had notebooks lined with the words always and forever. They were present in the margins of almost every page, next to pictures of rock stars and poets; drawn-out journal entries on friends and crushes; the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank. I would write the words over and over as a means of capturing a fleeting feeling, as if dedicated repetition would eternally halt the moment like a pressed flower behind glass.

There was a certain absolutism to be found in everything at that time, in the swelling, grey storm clouds that blustered across the horizon and the late summer days when the leaves would begin to turn – the half-burnt smell of smoke and decay lending to nostalgia. It seemed each moment had to be resigned to one extreme or another whether it was the foreboding sense of peace that flees even as it appears or the futile emptiness of adolescent boredom.

I noticed that feeling, in particular, on Sundays, when the late afternoon light would begin to fall. It held something of permanence – its inescapable emptiness – but also of that strange sense of the eternal. Perhaps it was because Sunday was the starting bookend to the school week where all of those first people I knew, their names and reputations, existed singularly and had a resonance that couldn’t be washed away so easily. Like many things during youth, there is an intensity of memory that is hard to lose.  

In those days, even imagining what the future could be meant that ‘life’ had a destination. Somewhere, somehow, once the world had decided it was time, an unmistakable permanence would drop from the sky like a cartoon anvil. I had imagined it could be firmly dictated by a bathroom full of sky-blue towels or a Malibu Beach house zoo that held nearly as many creatures as Noah’s Ark. Yet, that world of finite and perfect ends is merely a relic of a faith that has long since been renounced. 

From my West End apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, there is a part of me that is envious of those formative beliefs. Back then, that cartoon anvil of permanence did seem possible. But now life is all loose ends, and there is little illusion that the separate straws that make it up can be drawn back together into something cohesive – and chosen – ever again. 

In an apartment that is mine as long as I can rent it, for the length of time that developers are held back, there is little sense of permanence. Sure, the door latch that always sticks has been covered over with green tape for years, and the hardwood floor outside the bathroom that has always been sunken has sunk further so it creaks when I step too close to its edge. But even given the constant, everyday reality of these things, they will be forgotten as soon as I leave.

The seeming impermanence of a Vancouver apartment – or any apartment, really – is one thing. There was a time we were able to extinguish ourselves by moving to rebuild and start over, in another apartment or another city. The world could always begin again. However, the reality that abounds right outside the window is different still from the ever-renewable assumptions of my youth. Then, there were seasons: a warm summer that dissipated into a mild fall until winter took root, its depth taking time to unfold before the buds of spring frothed into first green.  

It is the middle of September and from where I sit most of the leaves remain on the trees but for a few sun-burnished ones. At night, the cold switches on like a light and even early in the morning I can feel a chill that goes further than Fall; a nearly arctic cold pressing in even as the days hovered close to 30 degrees just a couple weeks ago. Instead of adolescent ennui or the travails of living in an unaffordable city, the ultimate affront to the idea of home is now nature itself. The words always and forever may have felt unbearable in their own peculiar way in adolescence. But in a natural world that tosses and turns through the night – its struggles more visible with each passing day – these words bring on new vexation. One can plow towards the concept of home, always thinking that it’s a journey with a definitive end, but where does it end in a future world we cannot even begin to imagine? I look outside my window and can’t get a clear picture.

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