yes, me too.

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one." - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I was thinking about that quotation today, but in my memory, it was about reading. Funny how another person's words take on their own life in our own heads. But anyway, I suppose the reader and the writer are friends of a sort, so it still holds true.

I remember several moments. They are the basis of that enduring love of an author that you cling to for life.

It was there when I first read Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and understood that the monkey in my head that kept me from writing really meant that I should be writing. It was the moment I realized that real writers do the same battle in their own heads.

It was there when I first read Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, when Jayber was content to pack up all his belongings in one box and start walking, when he was content to sit in the back of an empty church to hear the silence, and when he was kept up all night to contemplate the darkness of the world. Well, I loved him for it.

And I'll never forget Annie Dillard's desire in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to sit still for hours on end to watch the insects or animals around her. I called it my sitting-quietly-time and she was doing it too.

I'm sure you know what I mean. I'm sure you have your own moments of profound connection, in whatever way, to another human being. Whether it's through writing or some other art form or something else all together, whatever form it takes, that connection is precious. Look for it.

I started to write this morning about the way autumn stirs up so many emotions in me and triggers such a wave of nostalgia for something. I said it yesterday - it is the season of literal change for me. Most of the many moves of my childhood happened late in the summer, so by fall I was always living someplace new. But that's another tale for another time.

Because yesterday, Joe Milazzo wrote a piece at The Lit Pub, I Feel a Song Coming On, about Nate Pritts collection of poems, Big Bright Sun. I don't know the collection or any of Pritts' work, but the piece is really lovely and worth a read.

But what was really lovely was when I read this:

"So, yes, there’s happiness in the book, but much of the time, that happiness assumes the form of some haunting. Is happiness really just an intense desire to be happy? Could it be that happiness has an accomplice in nostalgia, that longing for moods that were once more intense, that broken if healing recall not of any specific feeling, but the capacity to feel at all?"

Right there, he cracked my head open. Those words: happiness has an accomplice in nostalgia. In autumn, I have the feeling of longing for feelings. Don't mistake me, this autumn has it's own share of intensity and of feelings, and someday I'm sure it will feature in it's own episode of nostalgia. But this general wistfulness is not a longing for any one thing or any one feeling, but for the other moments of intensity when I became emotion. I can't say that my version is quite what he meant, in fact I think it probably isn't.

Still I said, Yes that's it. And after all, words have a way of taking on their own life, don't they?