Earl Ronneberg

Pilot lights are ever-burning flames that, when called upon, facilitate our need for warmth. But there are many kinds of warmth. There is a spiritual warmth in words which we visit to warm the divinity within us. When this happens pilot lights are metaphors for writers, poets, philosophers, religious thinkers and fictional authors who help us to see. Now the pilots become creative personalities who ignite our internal flames of affection, understanding and joys assuaging the pains of our days and enkindling the meaning of our destinies.

I suspect there at least three ways to characterize 'One Day In the Life of . . .' The first way is through a sunny perspective that poses a question for the reader and is expressed as follows: " 'One Day In the Life of . . .' is the story of a m nage trois (household for three) in which the married pair is the author and a summer home given to the author shortly after his marriage. The lover is the author's wife who forms, during fifty years of summer residence, a household of three. The question which is left for the reader is: can the lover, who is given full ownership of the summer home, come to share or even love the summer home thereby equalizing the relationships? There are no hints given to answer this question except the details of one day in the life of the author told from his point of view, together with appropriate digressions. The reader must answer the question for herself." The second way to characterize the work is much darker and would go so far as to remind the reader that 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is similar, in a very general way in that 'One Day in the Life Of . . . ', is a book about an ordinary person who is trying to survive in a world of objects and who often feels alienated from the modern world and makes few friends. But it is not fiction, nor will it destroy a country, and while historians consider Solzhenitsyn's work to be the turning point that unlocked the Cold War by revealing the Gulag in the frozen wastes of Siberia, a subtheme of this small work is warmth. A third way to characterize the work is to say there are several words that were never completely forgotten while writing the text; they came from a friend's e-mail when discussing a similar work of the author's and while employed in no less an environment than the Vatican. The words were: deep, introspective, and fascinating.