beloved pumpkin

A year ago tonight, I wrote this:

Monday, October 31, 2005

afraid of the dark

Calvin and Hobbes both speak for me. I love autumn, but there is an unavoidable melancholy in the fall.

It’s been cold and very rainy in this part of the world. Hard to hike on the weekends when the weekends have all been so miserable out. Then yesterday was gorgeous — shorts and sandals in the last few days of October, clear blue skies — but the missus is neck deep in paperwork, so I ended up heading out by myself.

I took the iPod, of course. Mises University 2005 lectures for the drive to and from the state park, but I listened to The Map that Changed the World while hiking.

Other than missing my beloved hiking partner, I found it perfect.

Except that it’s late October and it was already getting dark earlier — AND we set the clocks back this weekend, so the 6pm darkness came around 5pm and I finished the loop in pitch black. It’s amazing the things that look like monsters and bad guys in total darkness. I’m glad I decided at the last minute to stick to the paved trail instead of taking our usual meander through the woods.

Tonight is Halloween, but I got a fair spooking a day early this year.

But what I didn’t know when I posted that, was that a few hours later, my beloved missus would suggest that we go to CVS and buy a home pregnancy kit, and that shortly after that we’d be standing together in the bathroom of our Swarthmore apartment, Halloween night, looking down at the word etched in liquid crystal:

Sunday night I went walking in the woods again, first time without my wife in 364 days. Once again, I was listening to a history audiobook, this time on Ancient Greece. Unlike last time, however, I had a baby boy on my chest. We made it back well before dark.

Here’s our beloved pumpkin, giving us his best Halloween face:

And here I’m trying out a new recipe for pumpkin soup:

In the House of Sorrows

In response to the passage I posted from The Man Who Folded Himself, Kevin Carson offers this recommendation:

If you want a really interesting picture of a non-Judaeo-Christian world, you ought to check out Poul Anderson’s “In the House of Sorrows.” Jerusalem fell to the Assyrians at the same time as Samaria.

History went pretty much the same until what would have been the first century CE. The Roman Empire was never Christianized, and when it collapsed its successor kingdoms were pagan. And without the role of the Church as preserver of classical culture, the Greco-Roman heritage was mostly lost.

In what would have been the 20th century, the Levant is part of a decaying Turkish empire whose rulers worship the Warrior Buddha. The Turkish empire is a protectorate of Ispania, but is menaced by an acendant Zoroastrian Persia.

The royal dynasties of Europe still pay lip service to the old national gods, Jupiter and Wotan and all that, but most serious religious devotion is tied to membership in Persian mystery cults.

The endless layers of conquest, without any unifying civilization is reflected in the difficulty a learned mercenary in Palestine has in deciding whether an eroded statue is Herakles and the hydra or Thor and the Midgard Worm.

It seems the story is included in this collection: All One Universe.