The Solitude of Sunset

There's a solitude I sometimes know if I'm out walking around sunset; I've known it for a long time, or at least I can remember it back to when I was seventeen or so.

It's as if the whole world--and me in it--is at a grand hinge, and just might (if the moment is right) take the chance to become un-hinged. Not to fall into the dreaded abyss of non-being which we all imitate and flirt with in our sins, but to slip into the final Rest that is beyond becoming. And I know, or at least glimpse, that this Rest is the endless and smooth fullness of Activity that we clumsily give the un-name of 'God.'

It isn't like the solitude of being out walking at dawn, full as it is with freshness and promise and eager but peaceful energy. No, this solitude is one of resignation, a little melancholy but not really sad, as it lets go of the day that has been. What it was, for better or for worse, was what it was, and there's no changing it now.

Thus it's a solitude that imitates the moment and limit toward which all of our days and moments tend: that final limit when our little lives are no longer subject to any revision, when we have been who we were and for whom we were, because there's no more changing any of it, because we're dead. And we let ourselves go, grief, gratitude, distraction and all the rest of the be-blessed mess, out of the becoming into the Limit and Eternity out of which we all came in the first place, and which we kind of remember, but not quite.