J. SAMUEL YINGLING

This feeling has no easy metaphor. If pushed, I’d have to say it is like these monks I heard about at this one lecture who go into the village when the glacial snows start to melt on the eve of spring and they stand in the town square and ring these warm old bells and the mothers come out and hand them their babies wrapped in burlap and the mothers don’t cry but are filled with cotton sorrow on the inside because the monks take them and raise them in darkness underground and only in darkness until one night when the babies are grown tall and full-blooded after eighteen fallings and meltings of the glacial snows and the monks lead the young men outside and the night is a new darkness but the night ends and the sun rises and oh god how these young men fall into themselves and go blind and euphoric and they have no words for how they love the sun, for the serenity and peace and calm that is the sun to them, they can only smile and cry and feel the rays upon their pale white faces, so young and old.

That is how it feels.