Relay: Into The Twilight
The dark comes so early now. I shudder to think of the end of daylight saving time, barely a week away. But Tuesday was so mild and biking up Further Lane after work has become something of a mild exercise habit as I try to hold onto these great outdoors until the frost comes. So it was already getting dark as I pedaled east, then south, then west.
From long driveways, a few landscapers straggled toward home. A lot more deer, stock still, stared quizzically as I pedaled past, laboring on the cheap folding bike. This was Further Lane in the dying of the light in late October.
I stopped several times, to stare back and have a word with the deer, or take a snap of the horizon, pink and dusky gray-blue over blue-gray. Heading toward Old Beach Lane.
The outdated iPhone’s camera never gets it right. It doesn’t come close. The digital snapshot is dull and dark and small. It cannot capture it. But neither can I.
On the sand, a man practiced tai chi and another stood motionless and reverent at water’s edge and an elegant woman gazed at the sea and sky as her cavalier and happy spaniel ran freely. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” she exclaimed.
I thought a long moment and said yes, I think I have. “But it’s still magnificent.”
“It’s magnificent,” she said.
I wish I could speak in glorious Technicolor. But no, just black-and-white. “It’s hard to put into words,” I said, and corrected myself. “I can’t put it into words.”
“You can’t put it into words,” she said.
The night before, I’d learned that a young man I knew, just 20 years old, had died unexpectedly. His mother and I are friends, and the shock and sorrow for those who have lost him has made concentration difficult in the hours since. The awful news has also jarred a dark memory of a month and six years ago when my then-wife’s brother had also, at 27, passed away without warning. How is it that I had made it that far, and then so much farther, there on Further Lane?
I thought back to India, its colorful, fanciful gods and the Bhagavad Gita and Sri Krishna’s tender reprimand. “You are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor the dead.”
“Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.”
“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.”
The southern sky steeped in deep blues above, a long and delicate brush of powdery pink between, the relentless roll of the ocean below, and we four or five souls, helpless and bewildered on the sand before the terrible beauty at the end of Old Beach Lane. The elegant woman, barefoot, walked east, the galloping little dog charging into the twilight until I couldn’t see them anymore.
Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The East Hampton Star.