The Street Lights of Eternity

I gazed at the stars with the artist tonight. No light pollution. No urban mesh. One constellation that was particularly outstanding was Orion the hunter and his famous 'belt' and the great cloud of dust and gas known, I have read, as the sword of Orion nebula. It made our viewing playful as well as instructive. (Anything beyond the earth's atmosphere is an impossible distance; but at least it teaches you scale.) Earlier I had worked out without much pleasure that we were located close in the valley to where a woman who once commissioned the artist to do a portrait of a wealthy poet's wife committed suicide not so long ago. She died from drinking weedkiller. It was a terribly sad story. As I held the artist and we continued to stare at the sky, I saw what I think must have been Mercury to the east. I was also remembering the history of suicide not only in the woman's family but in her husband's too. I remembered climbing the side of a mountain in the land to the chilly north once with three people after a hearty lunch, one of whom was the daughter of one of the most renowned novelists of the last century who famously committed suicide. Later, years later, alas, so did she. 'Self-murder,' it used to be called. That would just about sum it up were it not for the other people such as her it can kill too. I don't know of any suicide in my own family - I champion, however clumsily at times, life - but ghastly it must be when it comes. A man from the small valley where we have been staying responsible many years ago for weaver's jobs eventually committed suicide after failing to preserve many such jobs after the introduction of the mechanical loom. Furthermore, not so far away, in a neighbouring principality, there has been a spate of over a dozen suicides among a group of teenagers. (I even spent time once writing an article about a group of people working for a well known charity created to stop people from killing themselves - http://www.samaritans.org/) That was a lesson. Anyway, I returned indoors with the artist from looking at the sky, both of us lit up, alive, glad to be alive, wary, strong, aware. Life. Sweet life.