When you ride the train to or from Boston's North Station, just over the bridge immediately after the train yard, there is a signal tower. There are actually two: the Boston & Maine Railroad Signal Tower A, built in 1931, and a small temporary signal tower on metal stilts. The latter is in use for trains, the former apparently still houses the drawbridge controls. Signal Tower A is a beautiful brick building outlined in copper. The facade overlooking the rail junctions and bridge is a hexagonal gable. It's not in great shape: big wooden poles hold up the sagging side closest to the tracks. The other building looks like an over-sized deer blind: it's a metal box on metal stilts. All ugly functionality. The new one is Lego Technic; the old one is brick-built.No one wants to be too much of a hand-wringer. And Signal Tower A probably isn't worth wringing your hands over anyway: it's full of asbestos. The train and drawbridge signal operators need to work in a non-cancer-causing room. But you can't help wonder, drifting by on the commuter rail, why can't we have nice-looking things? You imagine the masons and bricklayers in the midst of the depression building the signal tower for the drawbridge and its trains and doing great work. Theirs was a monument not to function, although the building did the job, but to beauty. The same brickies may have made a church or a statehouse. The people who replaced Signal Tower A went to industrial Amazon and bought the most cost-effective watch tower. It was mass-produced: the thing could stand around any high-security prison as a watchtower. Most of the newer structures along the rail line could be for prisons or for a war in Eastern Europe.
We're right about at the darkest time of the year. The blur between night and day seems the thinnest now, when we wake and catch the train in the dark, only to finish work and catch the train home, also in the dark. The Times reminds me that the risk seasonal-affective disorder is thing and that to properly mitigate it I need to buy the world's ugliest lamp and shine it right at my face for twenty minutes a day. (It also tells me to follow the Scandinavians, vanguard of all right-thinking moderns, and use the sauna and cold plunge liberally.) I wonder, before we aimed for pure utilitarianism and before we elevated function and practical causality above everything else, how did we cope with these dark days?
The ancient Yule was full of outdoor bonfires, indoor evergreens, and feasts; Saturnalia reminded people of the to-be-reborn sun with gift-giving, feasting, and merry-making. They honored light in the form of candles. These traditions morphed or were absorbed into the Church's seasons of Advent and Christmas. There is no practical purpose for a Christmas tree. It's a costly, ridiculous mess at best—and, with my penchant for incandescent bubs, a fire hazard at worst! The outdoor lights and candles in the windows all around our neighborhood aren't solving the root cause of our seasonal affective disorder. In doing these things, we honor the solstice. In a world where anyone can buy anything at any time, and have it delivered, we give gifts to each other for no utilitarian purpose. We give gifts to remind ourselves of the goodness of the gift giver. We do the work of Advent and Christmas for beauty.
Through the darkness
Young Americans and people around the world are flocking to the Catholic Church. The Free Press spoke to them to find out why.
What narratives about the rising number of Catholic converts miss.