The Dream of Heat

The sun burned the soles of my feet through my sneakers. Words pump like hot taffy out the spout of a machine. It is 95 degrees in the living room. As to how the heat affects the reading mind? I could say: I want to read about glaciers, frostbite, boreal plains. Instead, here's something written with the crisp chill of precision. Here, the dream of heat isn't chaos or inertia, but beauty, movement, order, song.

from Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

Consciously he slept late the next morning--did not awaken until six o’ clock, when he heard the Angelus ringing. He recovered consciousness slowly, unwilling to let go of a pleasing delusion that he was in Rome. Still half believing he was lodged near St. John Lateran, he yet heard every stroke of the Ave Maria bell, marveling to hear it rung correctly (nine quick strokes in all, divided into threes, with an interval in between); and from a bell with beautiful tone. Full, clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through the air like a globe of silver. Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees,--Jerusalem perhaps, though he had never been there. Keeping his eyes closed, he cherished for a moment this sudden, pervasive sense of the East. Once before he’d been carried out of the body thus to a place far away. It had happened on a street in New Orleans. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey sweet perfume. Mimosa—but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent one winter in his childhood to recover from an illness. And now this silvery bell note had carried him farther and faster than sound could travel.