Another Paean to the Rain

Yesterday was the start of a new semester, a fact which would have dismayed me, were it not for the darkened sky and cold winter rain which blessed it and made it holy. I was so grateful for it I almost cried, and I embraced the day with hope and joy.

Listening to the lovely pattering on the roof of my car, it struck me that the rain is spiritually centripetal, drawing all who are affected by it into a community, gathering all of humanity under an umbrella. The dreadful sunshine, contrariwise, is centrifugal, casting us outward, atomized, each to his lonely own.

Author: Harry Miller

I have traveled and lived in Taiwan, China, and Japan and am now a professor of Asian history and author of Southern Rain, a novel of seventeenth-century China. View all posts by Harry Miller