Today

...was the kind of day I remember or seem to remember from my childhood: sharp, cold and clear, with a hazy blue horizon and rows of tall empty trees all around. Frost spent the day trying to melt or evaporate but only half winning the battle. It was a classic winter's day of the historical imagination, of the kind you could be forgiven for thinking had disappeared completely. And above all it was just beautiful. The frozen and the freezing world, mechanical and natural, kept an angular beauty, ascetic in its lines and fragments. The kind of day, uncomfortable though it could be, that makes you glad to be alive and amazed that things are beautiful, as if just being here at all isn't enough.

No I'm not taking prozac, or especially happy, but days like today bring out the existentialist in me.