‘No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on,’ Voltaire was reputed to have said. That’s not what I believe. With deep winter upon us and the weather growing colder, even the wood smoke out of the neighbors’ chimneys could be described as philosophizing. I can see it move its lips as it rises, telling the indifferent sky about our loneliness, the torment of our minds and passions which we keep secret from each other, and the wonder and pain of our mortality and of our eventual vanishing from this earth. It’s a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet that precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement at the bare trees, the gray daylight making its slow retreat across the bare fields, and inevitably recalls that Emily Dickinson poem in which she speaks of just such a winter afternoon—windless and cold, when an otherworldly light falls and shadows hold their breath—and of the hurt that it gives us for which we can find no scar, only a closer peek inside ourselves where the meanings and all the unanswered questions are.
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Charles Simic, “Winter’s Philosophers”, on NYRBlog
Only a writer with the uncommon grace of Simic could have written something so slamdunkingly resonant regarding the onset of these now unavoidable winter afternoons and manage to namecheck effortlessly not just Voltaire and Dickinson, as in this passage, but earlier also Dovlatov, Cioran, Plato, Socrates, Pascal, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, Wittgenstein, Boethius, everyone, no one, all of us.
(via classicpenguin)