“And the part about light as a living creature,” he said. “What a beautiful thought. I hadn’t really heard that idea before…It really got me for a second,” he said. “I had to think about it. Is light alive? I mean, it doesn’t excrete anything. It doesn’t reproduce. And yet it gives life, so it must have some kind of life to give…” He’d isolated the ultimate kernel…the very idea that I’d fallen in love with, the idea of light as a kind of amniotic fluid flooding the cosmos.
DK Photo @ 5:23 am this morning. Nobadeer Beach. 57° F. Nantucket, MA. More photos from this morning’s glorious walk here.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
[…] I’m old but not when I go for a swim. A transformation takes place. In fact, it’s surprising how much younger the body feels in water.
What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You’re trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you’ve become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water.
As soon as your body feels the cool liquid element around you, you’re ageless. Memory takes you back to childhood, and you swim just as you did in your 20s, though this time you have brains.
And that’s the beauty of it. Age has endowed you with knowledge and experience. Now, in water, you have achieved the impossible. You’re young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray. […}
Obviously I feel none of that. I’m just an old man enjoying the water and the quiet, feeling peaceful if a bit tired, almost but not quite like an Irish selkie, who lives on land only temporarily, and whose true home is the sea.
Six ribs broken in 14 places. Three breaks in the lower pelvis. Right and left ankle broken. Left tibia broken. Left wrist fractured. Left toes, three breaks. Right clavicle broken. Right shoulder blade cracked. Eye socket, jaw, mandible, all broken. Major laceration back of head. Lung collapsed. Liver pierced from rib bone. The inventory of Jeremy Renner’s injuries, documented by the twice Oscar-nominated movie star himself, was exhaustive. It was a miracle that the actor had survived; he had no right to. Renner had been crushed by his own 14,000lb (6,350kg) snowplough on New Year’s Day 2023. A neighbour who helped him at the scene believes he died momentarily. So does Renner. He tells me it was a very special moment.
“What I experienced when I passed was this collective divinity and beautiful, powerful peace. It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. It’s the highest adrenaline rush. Everything stopped … maybe for 30 seconds, maybe a minute. It was definitive for me. It all made perfect sense.” Does he believe in God? “No. My dad’s a theologist and I studied all religions growing up, so I steer away from religions.” […]
But, of course, there was more to it than willpower. Last year, he released his second album of largely self-penned songs. Love and Titanium is about the accident, and so called because these are another two things that have helped him pull through – the love of family and friends, and the titanium that has helped fix all those broken bones. He was also extremely lucky. Nobody gave him much hope at the time. […]
The first song on Love and Titanium is called Lucky Man. “One day you just wake up / And finally realise / Life is so god damn beautiful / And I ain’t got nothin’ left to lose.” Renner tells me that it took him the accident to realise just how beautiful life was. Now, he says, he wakes up and knows he’s not going to have a bad day. No day alive is a bad day. But it didn’t used to be like that.
It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
— C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity (Tingle Books, May 17 2024) (via The Hammock Papers)
Notes:
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
