The best moment of the day

I've been on a major reading jag lately, most recently finishing up Nicholson Baker's book The Anthologist, which is about a poet who is procrastinating writing the introduction to an anthology of poems. Like Fellini's 8 1/2, a movie about a director who doesn't know what to make a movie about, Baker's book is a game of formalism, where writing about not being able to write becomes the novel. Towards the end of the book, the main character, Paul Chowder, gives a lecture about writing poetry, and there is a bit of business about the best moment of the day that is just absolute loveliness.

And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, ‘How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?’ And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I’ve written. I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?’ The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something that I hadn’t known was important will leap up and hover there in front of me, saying I am—I am the best moment of the day. I noticed two people were writing down what I was saying. Often, I went on, it’s a moment when you’re waiting for someone, or you’re driving somewhere, or maybe you’re just walking diagonally across a parking lot and you’re admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed over the windshield. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day. ‘And that’s my secret, such as it is,’ I said.
—Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Here's the best moment of one of my days recently...a winter's afternoon at the Great Swamp in Chatham, NJ.