A Single Distant Cry

This is a brand new edition - and wholly new translation - of Johan Huizinga's study of the 14th and 15th centuries in France and the Netherlands, and came out last year.

The reviewer linked below says it's the best of the existing three translations of Huizinga's work. Plus it's a hardback, with 300 color plates, and a freakin' awesome cover image, no???

From the review:

"Here was a reason to study history: not to learn names and dates, but to penetrate the hearts and minds of people long dead, to see and feel through them a distant world."

Isn't this the goal - and partly the method - of phenomenology? To get out of one's own natural attitude?

From my first reading of this book, this line stayed with me, and spoke to me, and lit a sweet light in the depths of my imagination:

"The modern town hardly knows silence or darkness in their purity, nor the effect of a solitary light or a single distant cry."

I think I had that in mind when I wrote this:

The only difference
Between what lies now
Below the hill and up the creek

And what lies on the lens
Of the soul
And mind of a sixteen year old boy

Between
This folded green
Valley
Lumpy with trees
Of many shades of green
Not quite hiding a small
Twinkle of a light,
On the one hand

And on the other
A lamp in the window
Of the last homely house
The pilgrim’s rest
Deep in that other valley

The only difference is that
The light I see in the trees
There away in the shadow
Of a May night
Falling beneath the rivulets of retreating snow
On the gray and blue peak
Way up and back behind,

That light
Twinkles
There, and there, and
There, a hundred times over

But that other light,
Like a tiny flame on the lens of his eye,

That light is so alone and quiet

Where the May night’s shadow
Drops light and quiet
Into the deep valley,
And the lonely woods
Have the day’s last
And angled light
On their golden leaves

That shadow there,
In that place long away
And far ago
Is as lonely and quiet as a
Nightingale’s voice in a
Sky already
Filling with stars

The one here is one
Of so many

The one there
Is only one, the only
Light

A candle on a stone sill

That listens to a wind
Whispering across its
Rough gray grain,

The yellow and orange
And blue flame
Wiggling
In the happy meeting of
Air and fire,

Two friends alone
In a wide and folded land

https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/new-english-edition-of-huizingas-autumntide-captures-his-original-voice-better-than-ever