Rain on a Velux

Rain on a Velux

Soaking dog weather outside the walls that surrounded me.

The grass in the garden had evolved from straw yellow to vivid green thanks to the gallons of water that had fallen on it. The bird droppings on the trash can outside had become a grimy gray soup in which a cherry pit floated.

A striped slug was drawing a toddlerish slime pattern on the tiles. As long as she doesn’t start crawling against the window, I thought. The week before, I had done my best to clean the glass streak-free.

Above me the clouds burst. From drizzle to downpour. It was that moment when I decided to write a blog about Velux windows. The slanted glasses I looked out on when I raised my eyes to heaven. Velux windows have that bonus over other windows of harmoniously accommodating the clattering rainwater. The ticking sound of hundreds of drops simultaneously through a simple layer of double-glazing. I lingered to listen to the water. The silent rain playing a beautiful chime on the panes above me. The window like keys, the drops like a mass of piano fingers.

I have always found rain to be something nice, especially as a child. It so often gave a cozy atmosphere to those gray days. Along with the rain, a specific aura fell over the fields hugging our garden. Gray and fresh … sad but invigorating. The sky shedding tears. The feeling I got from that apparently bears a name:

Spleen (Nederlands: miltzucht) is een moeilijk te concretiseren gevoel van onbehagen, van onbevredigd zijn en van hunkering naar iets anders van onbestemde aard. Deze literaire term betekent ongeveer hetzelfde als het Duitse ‘Weltschmerz‘ en is in de tijd van de romantiek algemeen ingeburgerd geraakt. Het komt ook neer op het zich ‘lekker droevig’ voelen of niet goed raad met zich weten. De teksten die vanuit deze toestand zijn geschreven worden ook wel spleen genoemd. De Franse Romantische schrijver Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) heeft dit woord in de 19e eeuw populair gemaakt met zijn gedichtenbundel Les Fleurs du mal (waaronder Spleen I, II, III en IV). ‘Spleen’ toont aan wat de Romantiek eigenlijk inhield. (Wikipedia.org)

Spleen, the term I learned in my first undergraduate year of Language and Literature, when we were studying Romantic literature, put the finger on that one melancholy feeling I got when I was a child peering out the window at the rain, or when I had to play outside in the woods among the trees because otherwise I would get too wet.

The feeling I also got, when I jumped into a dirty rain puddle with my rain boots (“exactly mushroom cream soup, like that color and those pebbles in it”). It is also a feeling of emptiness and melancholy, which makes you stare into the damp distance and wonder what you are doing now as a minuscule cur on this gigantic globe. Rain often does that. As if drops from the sky should make you sad or pensive just like other people’s tears.

I had the same feeling a few days ago, because of the gray light and raindrops on the Velux window.

 

~Hanna

Photo cover: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer by Caspar David Friedrich (1818). Photo via Wikipedia.org

---