Brushing off the rust.
Let's talk about the weather, for a start. As a subject, it is mundane. As such, therefore, as a subject it is rhetorically ideal.
Even if I express myself poorly, I am likely to hit a chord of common experience, and if I express myself well, I will revive in many people their own experiences of weather, and give to those experiences the dignity afforded by literary coverage.
Yesterday I walked, fighting idleness and loneliness. I drove myself on - stupidly - persistently - around the city. I walked a matter of ten miles or more, in cheap plastic havaianas, on one of the hottest days of the year. I walked to Brooklyn across the Williamsburg Bridge, and then back across and up to 57th street. It was roasting hot, by which I mean that all the moisture made it swelter, in a way that baking does not adequately describe. Nor was it tropically, swimmingly moist-hot. It was roasting pan pressure, on all sides of my skin. Walking in that heat, the hot pressed on every side, in and in and in, as the straps of my shoes slipped blisters under my weary feet, and I walked like the little mermaid, as she was in the old grimm version of the tale; on the sides of her feet and the balls of her toes, and limping to spare one foot then the next, delicately askance as she treads each tread in knives and coals. Walking, as I was walking - briskly, in the hope of making my own breeze - the heat built up from the inside, too, and pushed out as the hot air pressed in. And then the two heats would meet, somewhere in my flesh and I would be suffused. Sunburned from the inside out, and sweating from the outside in. I hopped between the sliding automatic doors of ice-cold shops, and when I felt that I could stand no more would slip gratefully in, pretend to browse to let the simmering die down and dry out and regain some semblance of civilised being; smiling and buying large iced teas; not just a frothing horse or panting dog, pushing mindlessly forward in the heat.
Even if I express myself poorly, I am likely to hit a chord of common experience, and if I express myself well, I will revive in many people their own experiences of weather, and give to those experiences the dignity afforded by literary coverage.
Yesterday I walked, fighting idleness and loneliness. I drove myself on - stupidly - persistently - around the city. I walked a matter of ten miles or more, in cheap plastic havaianas, on one of the hottest days of the year. I walked to Brooklyn across the Williamsburg Bridge, and then back across and up to 57th street. It was roasting hot, by which I mean that all the moisture made it swelter, in a way that baking does not adequately describe. Nor was it tropically, swimmingly moist-hot. It was roasting pan pressure, on all sides of my skin. Walking in that heat, the hot pressed on every side, in and in and in, as the straps of my shoes slipped blisters under my weary feet, and I walked like the little mermaid, as she was in the old grimm version of the tale; on the sides of her feet and the balls of her toes, and limping to spare one foot then the next, delicately askance as she treads each tread in knives and coals. Walking, as I was walking - briskly, in the hope of making my own breeze - the heat built up from the inside, too, and pushed out as the hot air pressed in. And then the two heats would meet, somewhere in my flesh and I would be suffused. Sunburned from the inside out, and sweating from the outside in. I hopped between the sliding automatic doors of ice-cold shops, and when I felt that I could stand no more would slip gratefully in, pretend to browse to let the simmering die down and dry out and regain some semblance of civilised being; smiling and buying large iced teas; not just a frothing horse or panting dog, pushing mindlessly forward in the heat.