• Home
  • Archives
  • About
Light On Dark Water
Home Archives About

About Sunday Light

 My collection of the best of the Sunday Night Journal can be ordered from Amazon, in both paperback and Kindle formats, and from bookstores. Clicking on the cover image below will take you to Amazon. As bookstores have yet to realize that they should stock it, you can make the job of special-ordering it easier for both you and the bookseller if you provide the ISBN: 978-0-9974708-0-2. My stated list price is $16 for the paperback and $8 for the Kindle version, though Amazon claims the right to change the price if they want to, and indeed have done so at times.

 SundayLight_ebookcover_final

The book is a miscellany, comprised of well over a hundred similar short pieces, on all sorts of subjects. I think it would make a nice bedside book. Here's a sample, from the very first month of the Journal, twelve years ago now. 

Sunday Night Journal — January 18, 2004

As if to remind me of a fundamental contrariness in the nature of things, certain signs of illness began to make themselves known to me around 4pm on the Friday before this three-day weekend. Apart from a few chronic structural problems, such as a bad back, I’m quite healthy—rarely ill and even more rarely ill enough to miss work. I’m also fairly sedentary and don’t generally ask much beyond the minimum from my body, or pay very much attention to it. So I’m always a little surprised when it suddenly resists or refuses the more or less automatic functioning that comprises most of its duties.

What I’ve experienced over the past couple of days is nothing much: it’s what my mother has always called “a bug,” making its presence known by mild nausea, weakness, and headache. If survival depended on my walking ten miles I could do it, but I really would rather not move any more than necessary, and so have spent most of the weekend in the recliner in the living room. And I can’t say that it has been a totally unpleasant experience. I’ve had a little reading, a little music, a little television, and a lot of looking out the window.

It rained all day Saturday. I live on the Alabama Gulf coast where even in January there is still a lot of green in the woods across the way, including the dark gleam of a magnolia. Throughout the day I watched the curtain of rain grow now more dense, now more thin, constantly varying the mixture of silver, grey, and green presented to me until the picture faded to black.

Because it is such a rare experience, this sort of temporary incapacity always serves me as a useful reminder that the body is not only subject to temporary failure but will indeed fail entirely one day. At the age of fifty-five this fact is increasingly of interest to me. Once I had no particular uneasiness about death, but that was only a failure of imagination. Some Christians have, or say they have (I don’t know whether to believe them or not) perfect certainty that when death comes they will close their eyes and wake up in heaven. I have some faith and a great deal of hope, but I'm also a man of reason and I don’t consider it utterly impossible that Christian beliefs are false, or that if they are true there is any guarantee that I will find myself among the sheep and not the goats. The one thing of which I’m absolutely assured is that, barring the Second Coming or some other direct intervention by God, I am, as the old song says, going to walk that lonesome valley, and I’m going to walk it by myself.

As I watched the rain fall I thought about the two live oaks we’ve recently planted, one in the front yard and one in the back. A few weeks ago my wife and I drove spikes of fertilizer in the ground around them and have been waiting for just such a good soaking rain as this. I thought with satisfaction of the spikes getting wet, and wetter, slowly dissolving, the nutrients seeping into the soil and being picked up by the roots of our young trees. A full-grown live oak is one of the most heartening sights in the world to me. They grow slowly, and I won’t live to see these trees in their full glory. But with some care and some luck (including a settlement of a now-distant but inevitable territorial dispute between one of the trees and the power lines) they will be magnificent one day, and someone will get the joy of them. That is a fine thought

Posted at 10:52 PM | Permalink

Would You Like to Be Notified of New Posts?

(click here for information about managing your notifications)

Recent Comments

  • Mac on Mostly About Music
  • Rob G on Mostly About Music
  • Mac on Mostly About Music
  • Craig on Mostly About Music
  • Rob G on Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit
  • Mac on Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit
  • Rob G on Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit
  • Mac on Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit
  • Marianne on Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit
  • Mac on Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit

Recent Posts

  • Mostly About Music
  • Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit
  • Any Day Now
  • Dune (the 2021 film)
  • Sally Thomas: Works of Mercy (and one or two other things)
  • Big Star
  • Orwell: Animal Farm
  • Dixon; Shakespeare
  • Some Music
  • What Is Actually Happening: 2023

Other

  • 52 Albums: The Complete List
  • 52 Authors: The Complete List
  • 52 Guitars (Subject Archive)
  • 52 Movies: The Complete List
  • 52 Poems: The Complete List
  • Favorites of 2016
  • Janet's Undead Thread v3.0
  • Non-blog Prose Writings

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022

More...

Categories

  • 52 Albums (54)
  • 52 Authors (60)
  • 52 Guitars (52)
  • 52 Movies (55)
  • 52 Poems (53)
  • Academia (11)
  • Advent (29)
  • Books (400)
  • Catholic Stuff (304)
  • Christmas (48)
  • Current Affairs (379)
  • Easter (15)
  • Film (213)
  • Food and Drink (17)
  • Four-Star Singles (21)
  • Games (4)
  • Language (18)
  • Lent (117)
  • Livin' in the USA (92)
  • Local Stuff (28)
  • Love, Marriage, and Sex (22)
  • Music (511)
  • Nature (17)
  • Obituaries (5)
  • Philosophy (18)
  • Photos (62)
  • Poetry (23)
  • Politics (195)
  • Pope Francis (36)
  • Religion (245)
  • Science (42)
  • Sports (11)
  • State of the Culture (313)
  • Sunday Night Journal (400)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2004 (52)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2005 (52)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2006 (54)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2007 (30)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2010 (15)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2011 (46)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2012 (52)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2017 (48)
  • Sunday Night Journal 2018 (52)
  • Technology (34)
  • Television (78)
  • The Faith (156)
  • Things That Annoy Me (14)
  • Travel (9)
  • Tyranny of Liberalism (15)
  • Weather (35)
  • Web/Tech (25)
  • Weblogs (16)
  • What Is Actually Happening (50)
See More
My Photo
  • Light On Dark Water Test •
  • Powered by Typepad •
  • Search by Google
Top