Lux Crescens

The light returns in fractions—
a minute portioned back today, another
tomorrow. I keep the count,
though clouds obscure the evidence:
three minutes banked by New Year’s,
another half-minute folded in,
five more by Epiphany.

The cold arrives in earnest now:
lake effect, the wind that finds
every weakness in the house’s skin.
But the light grows. The sun
keeps its promise without display,
deposits made, retained, compounded.

I watch for five fifteen, for when
darkness once took the day entire.
Now it hesitates. Now it waits.

February measures what accumulates:
an hour restored, perhaps more.
Afternoon lengthens itself,
light touching the sun room wall
at angles I had forgotten. Still
the snow, still the grey insistence
of overcast—but something
fundamental has shifted.

The sun climbs higher, stays longer,
asks nothing in return. This is not
spring—spring lies, breaks its word
too often to be trusted. This is
mathematics, planetary tilt,
the faithful working of the world’s
ancient machinery.

I am owed nothing.
I receive these minutes anyway.

March brings the balance: day and night
held even, aequinoctium.
The light has kept its promise
minute by minute, fraction
by fraction, until the ledger clears.

Not triumph—the cold can still
return, and will—but equipoise:
that moment of level standing
before the light tips into majority.

I have done nothing to earn this
except continue, except persist
through diminishment, watching
the slow reversal, the patient return.

The light grows still.
The light keeps growing.
The promise is not finished.

Icy Stars

Icy stars—
points of ancient fire made brittle by distance,
as though the heavens themselves had entered winter.
They do not blaze; they prick.
They hang, hard and lucid, in a silence sharpened by cold.

Such stars feel less like promises than reckonings.
Their light arrives stripped of warmth,
having crossed immensities where heat was spent long ago.
What reaches the eye is endurance, not comfort—
illumination without mercy.

In winter they seem closer,
because the air has been scoured clean of softness.
Each star stands alone, exact, unblurred,
the sky insisting on precision,
on the refusal of haze, metaphor, or excuse.

Indeed—stars resemble snowflakes.
Each one discrete,
each one sharp with its own geometry,
no two quite alike,
yet all governed by the same severe order.

They fall not downward but inward,
settling upon the mind rather than the ground.
They do not melt; they persist.
What snow does to the earth—
muting, clarifying, equalizing—
stars do to thought.

Yet they are dissimilar in temperament—decisively so.
The star, for all its pinprick stillness to the eye,
is violence without pause:
fusion, a steady hammer at its core,
plasma boiling and convecting within its bounds,
only to be held together by gravity’s unrelenting fist.
Its light is not calm but coerced—
order wrested from perpetual revolt.

The snowflake, by contrast, is obedience incarnate.
It forms in surrender to temperature, pressure, and time,
each facet answering silently to law.
Nothing churns; nothing rebels.
Structure blooms where energy dissipates,
an architecture born not of struggle but of yielding.

And yet—what appears as opposition resolves into fidelity:
both answering to temperature, to nature, to law.

Not submission,
but staying true
to what is given,
to what may not be otherwise.

The star obeys by burning.
Given mass and pressure, it cannot do otherwise.
Fusion is not choice but consequence,
law pressed hard upon matter
until light is forced into being.
Its turbulence is not rebellion
but endurance under extremes.

The snowflake obeys by forming.
Lowered heat, suspended vapor,
the slightest allowance of stillness—
and geometry appears.
No facet decides;
each angle arrives as it must.

Thus neither star nor snowflake is free,
and yet both are exact.
They do not err,
because they do not aspire.
They enact what must be—
and leave us to consider
what it means to call that perfection.

Constantine XI Palaiologos: The Wall Fails

Ἕσσεται ἦμαρ ὅτ᾿ ἄν ποτ᾿ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐϋμμελίω Πριάμοιο.

There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear.

—Homer, Iliad 6.447–449, in A. T. Murray, trans., William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library 170 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 306-307.

Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, πόλεων πασῶν κεφαλή·
Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, ἰδοὺ πόλις, κέντρον τῶν τεσσάρων τοῦ κόσμου μερῶν·
Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, Ἀριστιανῶν καύχημα καὶ βαρβάρων ἀφανισμός.

O City, City, head of all cities;
O City, City—behold the City, the center of the four quarters of the world;
O City, City, boast of the faithful and destruction of the barbarian.

—Michaelis Ducae Nepotis, Historia Byzantina, ed. Immanuel Bekker (Bonnae: Ed. Weber, 1834), 41.1-3.

I

The signs gathered like storm-clouds over stone.
The moon held three hours in shadow,
as if faithfully remembering an ominous decree.
The City’s ikon slipped from its golden frame,
while rain came hard, with hail,
and darkened the candles’ light.

Fog lay thick upon the streets at dawn,
as though the Lord of history had withdrawn His gaze
and left the walls to reckon with themselves.

That night a luminous glow hovered over the dome of Hagia Sophia—
to those within, a burning crown of sorrow;
to those without, a sign the City’s time was done.

II

The emperor took up the old, hard work of prayer.
Along the battered circuit of the walls he walked,
bearing ikons and relics in his hands,
with Greeks and Latins chanting side by side,
their quarrels stilled beneath a sorrowful resolve.

The Mother of God, the martyrs, the confessors—
all were invoked as if their names
could buttress mortar more than stone.

In the Great Church, under the shadowed dome,
he knelt, seeking pardon—from bishops, from people—
received the mysteries, asked to be forgiven,
then rose to bid farewell to those of his own house
before he went alone to read the nighted ramparts.

III

The last assault came early, unheralded.
Waves of men broke upon the landward walls
until the very earth seemed to remember Troy.

He moved along the parapets with measured speech,
offering encouragement and what comfort he could,
standing where the shot tore stone to dust.

For a time the line held firm, the Rhomaioi
answering iron with iron, fire with fire.
But hope, not courage, failed first.

Then Giustiniani faltered, wounded, borne away,
and with his going something in the defence gave way—
not the line itself, but what had held the line together.

Through the small, forgotten gate of Kerkoporta
the first invaders entered—
banner against beleaguered sky;

the towers fell, and the wall itself failed open,
not by thunderbolt, but by an unattended door.

IV

When the breach could no longer be denied,
they urged him to flee—to seek a ship, a safer shore—
but he refused to outlive the City he had served.

Casting aside the purple and the eagle—
signs of basileus kai autokratōr Rhōmaiōn—
he stripped himself of what set him apart
and stepped into the tumult like any other man.

Sword in hand, he went to where the fighting
thickened into one indistinguishable struggle,
so that no eye might easily discern
which body among the fallen had been emperor.

Later they searched for him among the dead,
found a head, perhaps his, to lift before the sultan’s gaze;
yet some would say no certain corpse was ever found,
that beneath the sealed Golden Gate stone keeps a vigil,
and that a marble emperor bides his time in sleep
until the City, once more, has walls to be defended.

The Catalan Principle: A Forgotten Standard for Financial Crimes

When I read The Independent article linked below, I immediately recalled what I call here, in my response essay, The Catalan Principle. The contrast seemed too telling to ignore. Although I do not, in truth, endorse the sanction discussed—certainly not in ordinary circumstances—the historical example provides a striking counterpoint to the modern rhetoric of punishment directed only at the powerless.

Medieval Catalonia—a principality within the Crown of Aragon, governed by its own Cortes and its own body of law—developed one of Europe’s most exacting systems for regulating bankers. This severe and unforgiving regime was born not of vengeance, but of a sober understanding of where real civic danger, and indeed real violence, actually lay. The legislators knew that a banker held the community’s life in his hands. A single failure of trust could ruin families, wipe out savings, and collapse the economic life of a city, indeed, a region. They therefore placed the full burden of responsibility on the man seated at the banker’s bench—the banca, the literal table or counter from which he conducted his trade and at which depositors entrusted him with their funds (the same bench that, when broken, gave us the word bankrupt).

Beginning in 1300, a banker was personally liable for every entry in his sworn journal, his entire estate pledged to his depositors. Should he fail, he was immediately proclaimed bankrupt and disgraced, then confined on bread and water until he made every injured party whole. In 1321, the Cortes went further: a banker who failed to repay his depositors—within one year for past failures, or immediately thereafter—was to be proclaimed bankrupt throughout Catalonia, beheaded, and his property liquidated for restitution. Most strikingly, the law added:

The sovereign may not pardon him unless his creditors have been fully satisfied.

No royal favoritism.

No political clemency.

No early counterpart to the corrupt presidential or gubernatorial pardons used to absolve wealthy offenders in the present era for their financial and other crimes.

This was not theoretical. In 1360, the banker Francesch Castello was beheaded in front of his own bench—the very table at which he had accepted deposits—after failing to repay those whose savings he held in trust. The medieval world understood that economic destruction is a form of violence, and that the most consequential harms are often inflicted by those with power, not by those without it.

Which brings us to idea voiced recently by billionaire Joe Lonsdale for a return to public hangings as a display of “masculine leadership.” His proposed spectacle targets the familiar objects of elite contempt: the poor, the desperate, the socially marginal. Crime, in his imagination, flows upward from the street, not downward from the boardroom.

But consider what a medieval-style code would demand today. If we applied the Catalan principle—that those who hold the wealth of others in trust bear the highest responsibility—we would direct our harshest penalties not at the powerless, but at:

executives who obliterate pensions through financial engineering,

bank officers whose decisions wipe out depositors,

corporate officers whose malfeasances and misfeasances devastate multitudes, in some instances, entire communities,

institutional leaders who destroy livelihoods while shielding their officers through legal artifice.

Would Lonsdale applaud that as “masculine leadership”? Or is his appetite for the gallows limited to those who possess nothing worth stealing?

The Catalan legislators understood something our own era too often obscures: the powerful commit the greatest harms, and justice serves the common good only when it restrains them first.

What Lonsdale demands is not justice but hierarchy—punishment downward, indulgence upward. The medieval world, in this case, was the more virtuous, the more honest. It placed the noose (or lowered the axe, as the case may be) where the damage was greatest: at the bench of the wealthy who had destroyed the lives of others, and it did not permit them to purchase their way out of accountability.

Source: Usher, A. Payson. (1943). The early history of deposit banking in Mediterranean Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard university press, 239-242.

INDEPENDENT: Billionaire Palantir co-founder calls for return of public hangings to show ‘masculine leadership’ in America

John V Palaiologos: Turning to the Wall

καὶ ἀπέστρεψεν Εζεκίας τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ πρὸς τὸν τοῖχον,
καὶ ηὔξατο πρὸς κύριον…
“And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall,
and prayed to the Lord…”
—2 Kings 20:2 (LXX)

I
Winter withdrew its favour. The palace lay in stillness,
its stones holding the residue of vows
spoken by emperors long buried—
a gold-lit catechism of dominion now muted by cold.
Through corridors dimmed by age
he walked without retinue or herald,
a man whose burden had outlived
the empire he was sworn to guard.
The ikon-lamps flickered as he passed,
their trembling halos soft upon the air.

II
He paused where councils once assembled,
where envoys bent the knee
and treaties were sealed with hopes
already fraying at the edge.
The saints on the walls looked on—
remote as lost kinsmen—
their silence neither blame nor blessing,
only the deep stillness of unchanging gaze.
He felt the breadth of that silence in his bones.

III
Past stewards and tired officers
he entered the inner chambers
where the breath of the world falls thin.
There the bed waited—a narrow shore
between the living and the lived.
He lay upon it gently, as though
the body remembered how to yield
before the mind would grant its leave.
Outside, the city kept its vigil of endurance.
An emperor—basileus kai autokratōr Rhomaíōn—
whose sceptre had become an inheritance
for hands that proved no stronger.

IV
At last, in the quiet appointed to all men,
he gathered the remnants of his strength
and made the gesture Scripture preserved:
the turning of a face toward solitude.
Slowly, without lament or plea,
the emperor shifted toward the wall,
entrusting what remained of breath and light
to the austere mercy of obscurity—
and to the uncrowned hours that follow every reign.