As the rain falls, still the world comes and goes

It’s half the hour between seven and eight in the morning. I could have said it’s 7.30 but it’s a slow day, and the words just jumped on a meandering train of thought. I’m sitting on a stool in the cafe looking out onto the car park. The rain is gently washing the air.

I cup the long black in my hands, take in the scent of coffee and the rising steam. A knife or fork scrapes a plate a few tables from me, there’s a low hum of conversation between the only two other people in the cafe. Their words fall to the floor before reaching me. The music from the speakers is dreamy piano, nothing dramatic or dynamic, just a subdued melancholia, as if the notes were pencil strokes on a meditation art book. It wafts through the room, suiting the colours of the day.

Nietzsche was more of a storm-laden guy.

The colours of the day are grey, even the primary ones. Still, the world comes and goes. For each car that arrives in the car park, one leaves. Each carrying those in the trades, those in the offices and more likely these days those in the home. The early coffee runs and the bakery seem to be the main drivers. People walk past on their morning exercise ritual, sometimes with the dog. This would be me and the dog, too, but this day is too wet. The dog is at home, no doubt dreaming of his walk.

Perhaps the rainy day is the philosopher’s pillow. But then there must be gradients to it, from feathers to rocks; Nietzsche was more a storm-laden guy – God is dead, the will to power, super mensch and all that. Aristotle was altogether quieter. Descartes I could imagine sitting beside me, saying aloud to the rain: “I think therefore I am. What about you?”

To which I could reply, watching the world come and go on a grey, rain-washed morn: “I think there is a loveliness to it all, Rene, I am sure.” I could tell him the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert used the start of his maxim, cogito, as the protagonist in his collection of poems. One, Mr Cogito and the Movement of Thought, goes like this:

Thoughts cross the mind/a common idiom has it

the common idiom/overestimates thoughts’ mobility

a majority of them/stand motionless

in a dull landscape/of bleak hillocks/and withered trees.

Sometimes they reach/the rushing river of someone else’s thoughts

they stand on the bank on one leg like hungry herons/mournfully they recall dried-up springs

they circle around looking for grains/they don’t cross because they won’t get anywhere

they don’t cross/because there’s nowhere to get to.

I could tell him, as the creeks and rivers rise, that this day will pass, that the waters will recede, that thoughts can form a bridge to someone else.

I could tell him, have faith.

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