Sunday. How the hours weigh us down, like a double quilt on a bed when the night suddenly turns warm and we awake, suffocating. How the minutes hang heavy like those at an airport as we wait for a flight that’s been delayed by weather.
Any Sunday is bad enough, but the worst is a rainy Sunday when the ingrained inertia of the day is doubled and drops of rain on the roof reverberate like the seconds of a clock ticking backwards. Hemingway, in his Farewell to Arms, has a young lieutenant in a military hospital looking at the rain and seeing himself dead out there. We don’t know if it’s a Sunday in the novel, but it probably is. Any other day of the week he’d be too busy with shots and nurses drawing blood, with visitors and noise on the ward to harbor such thoughts. Thomas DeQuincey, that old addict, wrote: “There is no duller spectacle on this earth of ours than a rainy Sunday in London.”
–Michael Hogan
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