Lucifer

Beyond being around old friends, few other sources of happiness appear in sight. There are the dogs, and yes, there is the peace and solitude of reading a book sitting by a window when it rains, sitting on a beach with the sand getting in between the pages – but this world never quite leaves you alone. Literally, physically, tangibly perhaps, but never within the mind.

But there are other joys, other refuges, other places where peace of mind can be found. The trek is a bit more arduous than the one where you see yourself collectively and imagine yourself together with an immense spectrum of people in a city – but there are similar cities, castles, labyrinths even of the mind to be found in your nearest library. And these conversations with souls alive, dead, remembered, and forgotten are often a lot more enlightening than the real thing.

The city saturates your senses with images, sounds, memories, stray glances, the glint of silver on a stranger’s earring ¬ – but it brings its own peace to look, like the cliché, into the middle distance, within or without, to see which of the perceptions are of the Buddha, and which of the Morningstar – who for all his fallen angel light-bringer aura, has inferno to administer and adjudge.