Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), Song in the Rain, 1947; transparent and opaque watercolor on wove paper, mounted on heavy board, 40 3/8 x 28 1/4 inches; The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Caitlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1957.16
A dark rainy day.
This is a real rainy day. Last nights smoky horizon has born fruit. It is a calm steady rain. No breeze. Very beautiful. That streaky perpendicular air is wonderful. It is only seen against earthly objects. The sky is smooth gray.
Horizon blotted out. To look out over the trees! Whole rows & groves of trees become one mass - heavy white rain mist is wonderful.
Always on rainy days like this, or snowy days, the sun comes forth about noon time only for a minute.
A rainy would be a fine day for meditation - if one had the leisure. The softened outlook does not attract the eye. One looks out across those mist blurred trees into illimitable distances & think wonderful thoughts.
Is freedom then the unrestricted indulgence of all the sensual passions – eating, drinking & the passion of sexual lust? Rather these are the fetters which bind us to this earth. He enjoys more freedom day by day who places greater and greater restrictions on himself in these respects.
Freedom is a state of the intelligence.
The glutton, the habitual drinker & lust loving man are the veriest slaves.
I have heard men say that if they did not indulge their sensual passion every other night, that they would not feel right. We know this is true of the glutton & drunkard. They think they are free because they indulge their appetites freely. The glutton acquires dyspepsia the drunkard paralysis (of both mind & body) and the lust-loving man a rheumatic and pessimistic old age.
I sometimes think that workmen with hard times before them as now have something to do besides seeing the necklace of diamonds which forms a halo over their factory - the telegraph wires studded with sparkling drops of water!
A rainy day - this adage is oft repeated - makes us love the sunny ones more So it is with the philosopher. There are days when he is pursued with the gravest doubts. His whole ideal of living seems awry - or indeed wrong. Then something happens - or again it is without an event - and as tho it were being revealed to us for the first time, the truth and beauty of his ideal is revealed to him - like the burst of sunshine after a rainy day, we think we never saw sunshine before.
How the smoke and steam cling to the ground. It seems alive. There is no evident breeze yet this earth cloud wanders about close to the ground vainly striving to ascend thru the spitting rain.
At 5:00 the clouds appear broken & hurl past from the north east. It is seldom we get rain from the northeast.
At 12:00 the rain still continues - a calm heavy downpour at the usual twilight hour a vague luminosity fills the air; it is indeed lighter than at any time during the day - that is, there is more reflected light. Sidewalks, roofs & upperleaves are aglimmer; rifts in the clouds are white.
Downtown with J – who is going on camping trip for two weeks.
Tree reflections ever retreating on the sidewalks as some beings.
Charles E. Burchfield, August 28, 1914