Vacation in Northern Michigan with Erazim Kohák, Part I: Day

A Time for τεχνή

Fleeing a Flood

Two weeks ago a pipe from the bathtub cracked and turned our kitchen ceiling into a tremendous, suspended reservoir. My Saturday morning began with the sound of water rushing downstairs after my wife ended her shower; I rushed myself down to the kitchen and was struck by the sight of our light fixtures transformed into four cataracts, pouring a deluge of water upon the kitchen floor. Running down the next flight of stairs, I found steady streams of water hanging like stalactites into my basement. Three floors of our house all flooded, bloated, and pierced with water.

After a little while, a crew of professionals tore out the sopping wet ceiling and began the process of drying out what could be salvaged from the walls. Industrial fans pointed their cyclones at the soggy beams in our ceilings; the creeping tendrils of hoses snaked themselves into our walls to dry them from the inside out; colossal dehumidifiers were parked in each room with tubes draining gathered moisture into our sinks. For the next five days, this army of air would strive to separate out water from dust, lest those forces ally themselves and foster mold in our home.

While I was grateful for all the power tasked with the waging war in my kitchen, the drone and whirring were maddening the instant the machines were turned on. Rather than forming a chaotic yet calming blanket of white noise, the voices of these militant machines coalesced into a constant, whining tone that bore itself deep into one’s being. Again, this sound would drone for five days straight—around the clock. Nothing but sound and fury, day and night. The din of war without pause, and seemingly without end.

Yet, as Fate or Providence would have it, our family had coincidentally booked a cabin up in Northern Michigan and invited us to join them for the week. Naturally, we graciously accepted their offer. Leaving behind all those bellicose tones behind us, we settled into the gentler music of the lake: waves lapping against the shore and the dock; breezes awakening harmonics from between the branches of trees, both deciduous and coniferous; the patting rhythms of cherry pits being spit and bottles of wines being popped. Along with the music, there was a dance of colors: the water covered the whole spectrum between the deepest shades of lapis lazuli and the brightest glow of turquoise stones; the trees and grasses seemed drunk with green; the flesh of dark cherries poured out their vermillion juices which were so rich, one could mistake them with beets; the light on the lake sometimes shimmered with an ivory so purely white it almost seems metallic, at other times pools of pinkish, orangish salmon hues gathered in its waves; the sun transfigured itself in a myriad of radiances, depending on whether it shone through a riesling or a pinot grigio. The most remarkable thing about this music and color was how it was ever-changing. There were no fixed tones or static colors. Capricious and playful winds, infinite angles of effulgent light, vibrant and tremulous water—they all collaborated and none would hold still. Everything was alive. For that whole week, the beat of every moment seemed to take me and my family up into the steady current, the multifaceted dance, of this adamantly ephemeral world.

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The Embers & The Stars

I sense my own place in the rhythm of the seasons, from seed time to harvest, the falling leaves and the stillness of winter. Some tasks are, perhaps, uniquely mine, not shared by other dwellers of the field and the forest. I can cherish the fragile beauty of the first trillium against the dark moss, and I can mourn its passing. I can know the truth of nature and serve its good, as a faithful steward. I can be still before the mystery of the holy, the vastness of the starry heavens and the grandeur of the moral law. That task may be uniquely mine. Yet even the bee, pollinating the cucumber blossoms, has its own humble, unique task. Though distinct in my own way, I yet belong, deeply, within the harmony of nature. There is no experiential given more primordial than that.

During this time removed from my wreckage of my kitchen and the churn of city life, I found myself embedded a bit more in the flow of nature. As I watched the light and lake, several thoughts accompanied me from a book read earlier this year: Erazim Kohák’s The Embers and The Stars. Kohák was a Czech philosopher living and teaching in New England who built his own cabin in the woods. Obviously, comparisons could be drawn with Thoreau’s Walden and the whole the American Transcendentalist tradition. If I had a lakeside cabin of my own, The Embers and The Stars would certainly be on my spartan wooden shelf (along with probably The Peregrine, The Compleat Angler, and The Wind and the Willows). His lyrical reflections on human existence and meaning in the context of the natural world and its rhythms seem like walking into one of Heidegger’s dreams: he talks about man-made objects and our world of artifice; he talks about our primordial kinship with nature and how that grounds our moral sense of the world; he talks about glimmering leaves in streams and families of porcupines; he talks about all this helps us find our place in Being. But just as he talks about Being, he naturally also talks about Time—specifically he talks about the significance of day, dusk, and night. In like manner, I’ll be sharing my reflections on them in three parts, beginning today with the Day.