diary
I stood beneath the full moon in the garden, in a single sock, and felt the whole vast indifferent cosmos crack open above me. I felt small, and holy, and briefly, genuinely a part of everything: a mote of the very same ancient material as the stars, on loan, merely passing through.
It endured perhaps ninety seconds. Then I wanted, with sudden and total clarity, a highly specific brand of crisp. The salt-and-vinegar variety. The transcendence did not survive first contact with my own appetite, and withdrew quietly to wherever such things wait.
I used to regard the snack as the failure: to suppose that a properly spiritual person would have remained in the garden, ascending, rather than padding back indoors to stand in the light of the refrigerator like a raccoon possessed of a soul. I imagined the hunger cancelled the holiness out.
I think now the two were never opposed. The same self that grazed the infinite is the self that grows peckish; there is no dualism in me profound enough to house the sacred and the salt-and-vinegar in separate rooms. The mote of stardust also has a stomach. That is not the flaw. That is the whole strange miracle of the arrangement.
We are not constructed for sustained transcendence. We are constructed for glimpses of it, apprehended between snacks, in a single sock, on an unremarkable night. I had my ninety seconds of the infinite and then I had my crisps, and I have decided that a life composed of both, in precisely that order, is not a lesser life. It is the only sort on offer, and it is ample.
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