malaise*lithium

Last night was the solstice. The shortest day of the year. The longest night. Most people don’t know that, as the clockwork of the solar system advances, the winter solstices have begun to occur when Earth is at her perigee; when she is furthest from the sun.

The average distance between Earth and the sun is 148,059,648 kilometers, but right now, Earth is 156,106,368 kilometers from the sun. Neither do most people know that Earth does not follow a circular path, and nor, as you may be thinking, is it an elliptical one. The path of Earth is eccentric. It is shaped like an egg.

In the winter, all the miles that anyone on Earth will travel during his or her whole life would never get them as near again to the sun as summer could. In the winter, the sun shrinks in the sky as if contracting, and in doing so, draws all the heat from the atmosphere; all the joy from the soil. In the winter people go about cursing each other. They lift their collars against the wind and squint at the sky, trying to remember if the sun was ever any more than that pale speck.
All the children receive telescopes for the holidays. They run outside when the sun comes up at ten o’clock and their grandfathers help them set up the telescopes on the picnic table or on the hood of their fathers’ Lincolns. The grandfathers peer into the small stapled booklets that accompany the telescopes; read aloud about how to adjust the telescope’s focal point and intrex and iris. They read about the features one is supposed to be able to see on the sun. The Pools of Bathsheba, Zor-El’s Fingers, The Icarus Gorge.

The lines of The Icarus Gorge. meet at right angles. They fooled Max Plank. They made him write silly things about people who live on the sun. “That is impossible,” say all the grandfathers, all at the same time, “because the sun is much too far away for anyone to reach in the first place.” They say it all at the same time because their pocketwatches all chime at the same time, because they all met a few days earlier and decided upon it. The children are not interested. They are too young to use the instrument properly and they bump it and smudge it and wish they had received something else.
In the winter the women are frigid.
In the winter no one can think. This is because the brain is a pot boiled by Neutrinos. Neutrinos are a fictitious, imaginary particle inspired by a real, theoretical particle called the neutrino. Notice the capitalization difference. Neutrino, imaginary. neutrino, real. Neutrino, imaginary. neutrino, real. neutrino is never capitalized, even if it is at the beginning of a sentence, because it might become confused with Neutrino. Scientists are very worried about their work becoming confused with imagination. But the important thing here is that, in the winter, the Neutrinos do not reach Earth at the 213,000 kilometers per second required to excite the synapses to firing; to heat the brain to boiling. In the winter, Earth is so much farther from the sun that even though they are going so fast, it takes the Neutrinos an additional 21 seconds to reach Earth, and by that time they have slowed to only 1.4 kilometers per hour. They practically drift. Brains come off of boil, they simmer, they cool. All of the professors, suddenly thoughtless, run around in the courtyards of the universities, catching neutrinos on their tongues.
In the winter the night is twenty hours long. By the time the day arrives, it’s almost over.
In the winter, everything becomes grey. The Neutrinos collect everywhere, like volcanic ash. Young men cease to think of love. They think, instead, of fire, or — dare they? — of light bulbs, of orbs of whiteness. Late at night they lock themselves in their bedrooms and stare at sheets of typing paper. Stare into the perfect blankness. In the morning they emerge with sagging eyes, their noses red. They go to the stationary store with their friends, to make it normal, and buy reams and reams of A4.
In the winter machines run backwards. Crones turn their televisions upside down to set the picture right. They bang the things.

In the winter all the creeks freeze solid. The fish hold their breath. They blink. The fishermens’ lines are captured. They must stand around; hold their poles; wait until spring.
In the winter water must reach 108 degrees to boil, because when Carolus Linnaeus reorganized the celsius scale he failed to take into account the fact that the orbit of Earth is shaped like an egg.
Winter begins at the winter solstice, when Earth is at her perigee. On around the sun winter persists, as Earth wobbles through the cosmos, from the point of the egg down to its side. There, exactly between the high cold peak of winter and the broad dome of the summer; at the hip of the egg, is the equinox, where day and night are the same length. There they are indistinguishable, and another kind of madness settles on Earth. This is followed by the madnesses of summer–the madnesses of the apogee.
Then Earth stops, stops the way a bullet fired straight up will stop, just centimeters from the breast of the bird, and return back along its path. Earth retreats from summer, falls back through the equinox, lands again in the saddle of winter. Intersects the perigee.