Friday Five: winter solstice reads

There’s something about this time of year that makes me want to spend more time with a book. Maybe it’s the shorter days and lengthening hours of darkness, which translate into less time outdoors and more time inside. Or maybe it’s the chill in the late autumn air, the bare trees, the transition into midwinter, and the weariness that arrives with the end of a long year.

Whatever it is that puts me in the mood to read, I’m thinking I’m not alone and that you, too, might be looking for some worthwhile reads. With that in mind on this winter solstice eve, I offer you five pieces that celebrate the coming day, our shortest of the year in the northern hemisphere. So build a fire, grab a cup of coffee or hot cocoa or mulled cider, crack open that screen, and enjoy these reads.

1. “Out in the Dark,” by Edward Thomas. A lovely, haunting, lyrical poem.
2. “Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today,” by Emily Jungmin Yoon. Yoon is a poet, editor, translator, and scholar, and this poem exemplifies her love of language and the power and beauty of it.
3. “Burn Something Today,” by Nina MacLaughlin. Published December 21, 2020, in The Paris Review, this essay, in beautiful, poetic flowing language, explores the in-betweenness of this day. “On the solstice, all the oppositions are alive, not in tension, but melting together, joined in the rolling-tolling ring of things. Tonight, there is space for all of it at once, the irreconcilables, the rival forces, the great dualities. Tonight, it’s not either-or, but both and and and.”
4. Annie Dillard on the Winter Solstice, by Maria Popova. In this essay, Popova, who writes about literature and culture on her website The Marginalian, discusses Dillard’s “splendid meditation on the winter solstice,” which originally appeared in her 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Quoting liberally from Dillard’s work, Popova describes how Dillard “considers how winter highlights one of the central perplexities of existence — the mystery of beauty”. In a sentiment that calls to mind Baudelaire’s assertion that “beauty always has an element of strangeness,” Dillard ” even as she “contemplates winter’s strange and sorrowful landscape of loss.”
5. “6 Poems for the Winter Solstice,” a collection of short reads by Mary Oliver, Susan Cooper, Wendell Berry, and others. Each poem is a jewel, but perhaps the one that shines brightest, albeit briefly, is Berry’s “To Know the Dark”:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

– Wendell Berry, “To Know the Dark”

Wishing you all a merry solstice.

Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay.