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Day’s Verse:
It shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer; and while they are still speaking, I will hear.
Isaiah 65:24
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Title: something I found in my Major British Writers II notes on Walter Pater. Also: “There is no beauty without a degree of strangeness.”
Today a line of cars miraculously appeared at a stop sign, then drove by as I waited for the shuttle home. They followed a gray Cadillac hearse. Did it offer a sense of solidarity to the people, even though each had his or her own car? Each affixed a purple flag with a sideways white cross to their vehicles and each had turned their emergency blinkers on to mark theirs as a unique cavalcade. People seek solidarity. Belonging to a group, even such a mournful group, means having a place that associates with you. In the procession, they were tied together by one thing: loss of a loved one. Each person in each separate vehicle had a connection to all the others that they demonstrated by driving together, slowly, with the flags and blinkers. Ian and I show our connection by wearing identical wedding bands. Wearing a school sweatshirt ties you to the school, and even wearing brand-name clothes offers some amount of “solidarity” with other people wearing the same brands. Marketers heavily exploit the public’s necessity to have a group association by promising that if you buy their product, you’ll receive instant admission to that group.