My choice of painting was inspired by 39 Down. I looked up the term online and found it originally referred not, as I thought, to a raucous but harmless celebration of some sort, but to a noisy, sometime violent mock-parade held to express collective “disapproval of different types of violation of community norms” (Wikipedia). And this reminded me of everything that arouses the misanthropy against which, dear solver, I am perpetually struggling—it reminded me, that is, of mindless tribalism, hideous clamor, deliberate cruelty in the service of some sanctimonious purpose. I found myself longing for silence and emptiness. The inhabitants of these Aberdeenshire farms, however maliciously inclined, have got to remain quietly in their snowbound buildings for the present.
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