On the edge of vision
This will blow your mind: in the American South, "Canadian" is apparently a racial slur.
Yeah, you digest that. You dirty Canadians.
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
And that makes me think of my Man and the Natural Environment class, which is changing my life for the better. It's actually the only class I find myself interested in, and that's no bad thing. It just means, I think, that my interests have been whittled to a knife's edge, all the extraneous matter has been cut away. Strangely, I suppose, I'm left with God and Nature.
Nasr is brilliant beyond words. Here, as an example: his mastery of English, his second language, astounds me. Even though he's probably been speaking it for 40 years, reading his writing is really stunning. His writing is poetic and sinuous, something I couldn't even dream of doing in French.
He told us an anecdote the other day, about some dairy farmers in the Swiss Alps. The farmers would take their cows up to a certain point in the mountains, and then no farther. When he asked them why they didn't continue up the mountain into all the verdant and untouched pasture, one of the farmers replied:
Cette terre, c'est le terrain des anges.
If I didn't butcher it, that means "That is the land of the angels."
Nasr thinks we've lost that kind of reverence and I agree wholeheartedly.
We've also been reading a lot of Kierkegaard in another class, and that also gets my juices flowing. Kierkegaard is all about "faith by virtue of the absurd." We cannot even have faith until we've given up all hope, until we've "made the movement of infinite resignation." Once we realize the impossibility of God, eternity, or "marrying the beautiful princess," to use his example, we must make one final movement, the one Abraham made, and just believe. When we realize the full, unfathomable absurdity of faith, then we can truly begin to believe.
I like that a lot too. Mr. Larkin should've had a little faith, and I think he did, or he wouldn't have written such a beautiful poem.
I'm inexorably on the path to hermetic monkdom. You guys always knew I'd become a monk anyway.
Yeah, you digest that. You dirty Canadians.
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
And that makes me think of my Man and the Natural Environment class, which is changing my life for the better. It's actually the only class I find myself interested in, and that's no bad thing. It just means, I think, that my interests have been whittled to a knife's edge, all the extraneous matter has been cut away. Strangely, I suppose, I'm left with God and Nature.
Nasr is brilliant beyond words. Here, as an example: his mastery of English, his second language, astounds me. Even though he's probably been speaking it for 40 years, reading his writing is really stunning. His writing is poetic and sinuous, something I couldn't even dream of doing in French.
He told us an anecdote the other day, about some dairy farmers in the Swiss Alps. The farmers would take their cows up to a certain point in the mountains, and then no farther. When he asked them why they didn't continue up the mountain into all the verdant and untouched pasture, one of the farmers replied:
Cette terre, c'est le terrain des anges.
If I didn't butcher it, that means "That is the land of the angels."
Nasr thinks we've lost that kind of reverence and I agree wholeheartedly.
We've also been reading a lot of Kierkegaard in another class, and that also gets my juices flowing. Kierkegaard is all about "faith by virtue of the absurd." We cannot even have faith until we've given up all hope, until we've "made the movement of infinite resignation." Once we realize the impossibility of God, eternity, or "marrying the beautiful princess," to use his example, we must make one final movement, the one Abraham made, and just believe. When we realize the full, unfathomable absurdity of faith, then we can truly begin to believe.
I like that a lot too. Mr. Larkin should've had a little faith, and I think he did, or he wouldn't have written such a beautiful poem.
I'm inexorably on the path to hermetic monkdom. You guys always knew I'd become a monk anyway.