Like some others recently installed in the neighborhood, the new streetlight near Don and Jane’s house doesn’t have a plastic enclosure for the bulb. And this morning I noticed a spider has built a web across one of the four exposed sides. Beaded with moisture from the fog, it was beautifully illuminated. The spider could have chosen any bush or tree growing nearby. Instead, it climbed the smooth, silver pole as if it had been a maple or an oak. It makes me wonder if spiders ever climb to the top of cell towers.
Who are Don and Jane? Like the spider, they are you and me in disguise. Still, we call each other by our names, using the languages of English and the wind.
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Read the sixty-second chapter of Middlemarch, finishing Book VI, “The Widow and the Wife,” bringing me to Book VII, “Two Temptations.” Vol. III, Page 148.
October 18, 2023.
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Categories: If It Had A Name
Tags: English, George Eliot, Identity, Journals, Language, Maples, Middlemarch, Names, Oaks, Reading, Spiders, Street Lights, Trees, Wind
William Michaelian 