a day to be remembered

here is another poem from W. S. Merwin, titled “The Anniversary of My Death.”

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

I need to get my hands on a book of his work.

an intellectual grandpappy

a few vintage thoughts on religion from a very old Bertrand Russell:

well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true … at least I rule it out as impossible: either the thing is true or it isn’t. if it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. and if you can’t find out whether it is true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment … it seems to be a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.

a refusal to mourn

another Dylan Thomas poem that works for me, titled “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”  death not to be trivialized and made into propaganda, death not to be brushed away, but death not to be feared, not because of anything that follows (or doesn’t), but because of how it unites us with everything else.  can’t say I wouldn’t mourn this death, though…

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

book review: Everyman

this is one of the most perfect books I have ever read.  from the first pages it weighed on my heart, tugging more and more as I skipped and bobbed along Roth’s perfect prose.  taking its title (apparently) from a medieval morality play designed to remind its viewers of the inevitability of death –and thus the necessity of piety — this is a book and ultimately a character hanging reluctantly but increasingly on “the knowledge that you are born to live but die instead.”

it is about living and bearing life, with all its (and your own) successes, fears, joys, betrayals, and failures.  it is about loneliness.  it is about growing old (“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre”).  but most of all, it is about death and the fear of leaving “our fullness for that endless nothing.”  and it is wonderful.

nature’s clasp and kiss

a few beautiful excerpts from Robert Ingersoll’s eulogy/tribute to Walt Whitman, particularly about the latter’s death, and about death itself:

He wrote a liturgy for mankind; he wrote a great and splendid psalm of life, and he gave to us the gospel of humanity — the greatest gospel that can be preached.

He was not afraid to live, not afraid to die. For many years he and death were near neighbors. He was always willing and ready to meet and greet this king called death, and for many months he sat in the deepening twilight waiting for the night, waiting for the light.

He never lost his hope. When the mists filled the valleys, he looked upon the mountain tops, and when the mountains in darkness disappeared, he fixed his gaze upon the stars.

In his brain were the blessed memories of the day, and in his heart were mingled the dawn and dusk of life.

He was not afraid; he was cheerful every moment. The laughing nymphs of day did not desert him. They remained that they might clasp the hands and greet with smiles the veiled and silent sisters of the night. And when they did come, Walt Whitman stretched his hand to them. On one side were the nymphs of the day, and on the other the silent sisters of the night, and so, hand in hand, between smiles and tears, he reached his journey’s end.

From the frontier of life, from the western wave-kissed shore, he sent us messages of content and hope, and these messages seem now like strains of music blown by the “Mystic Trumpeter” from Death’s pale realm.

To-day we give back to Mother Nature, to her clasp and kiss, one of the bravest, sweetest souls that ever lived in human clay.

Charitable as the air and generous as Nature, he was negligent of all except to do and say what he believed he should do and should say.

And I to-day thank him, not only for you but for myself, — for all the brave words he has uttered. I thank him for all the great and splendid words he has said in favor of liberty, in favor of man and woman, in favor of motherhood, in favor of fathers, in favor of children, and I thank him for the brave words that he has said of death.

He has lived, he has died, and death is less terrible than it was before. Thousands and millions will walk down into the “dark valley of the shadow” holding Walt Whitman by the hand. Long after we are dead the brave words he has spoken will sound like trumpets to the dying.

And so I lay this little wreath upon this great man’s tomb. I loved him living, and I love him still.