"Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands," and the line you quote: "we are less permanent than thought" - try explains these lines to brown nosers and some of those ACs or DCs ... memento mori (remember you will die)
How can any of us prepare for the time when we are absent from this world with all its beauty and joy. Yet each of us know this is how it will be.
Thus we savour what we have. Each glimpse, moments when we are almost shaken from the moment itself and see anew, almost as if for the first time.
Over the last three or four weeks a flight of about half a dozen geese has passed over the rooftops of the street where I live as evenings’ darkness falls. They fly overhead, honking loudly, darker shapes against the darkening sky.
The sound as they are briefly here, the stillness after they’ve have gone,and then the empty street below.
Autumn evening-
After geese
The skies silence
Why Civility Is So Difficult In A Democracy
“To regard one’s opposition as being on the wrong side of an important political dispute is to regard them as being on the side ofinjustice. Thus, heated tones, raised voices, and spicy language – not to mention a measure of frustration, impatience, and resentment – are precisely what should be expected in many democratic disagreements.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Bob Carr who was recently 72 links to Brooks' storyHard to find anything original on Trump, impeachment, US trauma and decline. That’s why this somewhat brilliant column by David Brooks stands out. Explaining why he may hold tight that base. nyti.ms/2neKaqW
It's been a real jolt to the senses seeing Bob Carr back canvassing for the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party rather than the Communist Party of China or the Palestine Liberation ...
Former Labor Premier Bob Carr told an intriguing story about himself at this morning’s launch of his latest book, Run for your Life. At the end of his first year at university, while bushwalking in the Blue Mountains, he’d entered a local restaurant and asked the waitress for a “chicken”.
Bemused, she went out to the kitchen and brought out a chicken breast in a paper bag. “I meant to eat here,” he replied. Bob, from the working-class Sydney suburb of Matraville, had never been inside a restaurant and didn’t know that you sat down and read a menu. “That was the background that I came from.”
DEATH
You're one of four siblings. You lost your brother Greg at a young age – too young an age.
Greg died in his 20s [of a heroin overdose in 1983, aged 28]. I was seven years older. He lingered for the better part of the year in a hospice, diminishing, because he was in a coma. My poor mother and father had to visit him in the hospice five days a week to sit by his side and imagine there might be some communication with him. The year he died, I went into state parliament.
That's a dramatic year for everyone.
If my working-class parents got satisfaction in having their eldest son get elected the same year Gregory floated away, that's a consolation.
How did Greg's death change you?
The only sense we make of existence is by making a contribution, and he didn't get to make one. When I think of someone dying in his or her 20s, like Gregory, I guess it's a missed opportunity to make a contribution, whatever it might've been. Graffiti artist. Diligent parent. Electrifying teacher.
How would you want to be sent off after you die?
The more dignified way is to have none. Just go quietly. Let your deeds speak for themselves. I'd like to think I'd have the presence of mind – when I do get a sad diagnosis from a specialist – to walk out into Macquarie Street and say, "Well, that's that then. I'll put everything in order. I had a simple ambition when I was 15 and I've fulfilled it."
What was that ambition?
To be a serious career politician. What did one of Joseph Conrad's characters say? "Be loyal to the nightmare of your choice."
'The Edsels of the World of Moveable Type'
“There are paragraphs by Raymond Chandler that are underrated. But it’s an open question whether he wrote any underrated novels. The most overrated books almost all emerged simultaneously from a single genre: magic realism. I can’t stand it. I always found ordinary realism quite magic enough.”
Chandler is no longer underrated. I’ve been waiting decades for someone to admit what serious readers have always known: magic realism is a lazy, tedious, over-hyped con job. Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and the rest – their books are often unreadable. Think of the young people who have been told these are “classics.” Please, don’t feel guilty when you find such books and writers boring. Significantly of the 105 essays in Cultural Amnesia, only thirteen are devoted to writers known primarily as novelists. James is comparably honest and direct when asked to name his “comfort read,” a category even more ridiculous than “comfort food”:
“That’s not a concept that I’m familiar with. If reading didn’t make me uncomfortable in one way or another, it would just send me to sleep. I get comfort in other ways. I once wrote a poem called ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.’ I’m afraid I still get a big bang out of seeing the books of my rivals being utterly ignored.”
James is unafraid of Schadenfreude and invective, two of life’s sweetest pleasures:
“Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.”
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At a certain point in one's life, the deaths begin to accumulate, don't they? Family members and relatives, close and distant. Friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, classmates, neighbors. In the public sphere, nearly every week brings news of the deaths of musicians, assorted entertainers, sports heroes, and other figures who one "grew up with." (Ah, the vanishing rock stars, carrying away our youth!)
One grieves to a greater or a lesser extent, but, on a purely self-interested level, one also begins to get the message. Something along these lines:
An autumn evening;
Without a cry,
A crow passes.
Kishū (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 345.
Or, in the context of a different season, this:
Spring has departed;
Where has it gone,
The moored boat?
Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume 1 (Hokuseido Press 1963), page 286.
Buson's haiku leads naturally to this waka, which was written nine centuries before Buson's time (the continuity of Japanese poetry is a wonderful thing):
Our life in this world --
to what shall I compare it?
It is like a boat
rowing out at break of day,
leaving not a trace behind.
Sami Mansei (early 8th century) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 51.
In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius now and then posts lists of the illustrious and not-so-illustrious dead in order to remind himself that all is vanity and that all living things, including the emperor of Rome, are evanescent bubbles. For instance:
"Hippocrates, after conquering many diseases, yielded to a disease at last. The Chaldeans foretold the fatal hours of multitudes, and fate afterwards carried themselves away. Alexander, Pompey, and Caius Caesar, who so often razed whole cities, and cut off in battle so many myriads of horse and foot, at last departed from this life themselves. Heraclitus, who wrote so much about the conflagration of the universe, died swollen with water, and bedaubed with ox-dung. Vermin destroyed Democritus, and another sort of vermin destroyed Socrates."
Marcus Aurelius (translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor),Meditations, Book III, Section 3, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor,The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).
I understand what the emperor is getting at: "Then stop, and ask, where are they all now? Smoke, and ashes, and an old tale; or, perhaps, not even a tale." (Meditations, Book XII, Section 27.) Yes, understood. But, as Marcus knew, this recognition is only the starting point for leading a good life and arriving at a good death. And now, Philip Larkin chimes in: "Death is no different whined at than withstood." ("Aubade.") Yes, understood as well. One will never be prepared. With an apology for being self-referential: "How little we know! It leaves you breathless."
In the meantime, I prefer lovely intimations. A crow passing silently overhead in the evening sky of autumn. A still pond and a departed boat. A seaside town in late September.
September in Great Yarmouth
The woodwind whistles down the shore
Piping the stragglers home; the gulls
Snaffle and bolt their final mouthfuls.
Only the youngsters call for more.
Chimneys breathe and beaches empty,
Everyone queues for the inland cold --
Middle-aged parents growing old
And teenage kids becoming twenty.
Now the first few spots of rain
Spatter the sports page in the gutter.
Council workmen stab the litter.
You have sown and reaped; now sow again.
The band packs in, the banners drop,
The ice-cream stiffens in its cone.
The boatman lifts his megaphone:
"Come in, fifteen, your time is up."
Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).
One grieves to a greater or a lesser extent, but, on a purely self-interested level, one also begins to get the message. Something along these lines:
An autumn evening;
Without a cry,
A crow passes.
Kishū (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 345.
Or, in the context of a different season, this:
Spring has departed;
Where has it gone,
The moored boat?
Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume 1 (Hokuseido Press 1963), page 286.
Buson's haiku leads naturally to this waka, which was written nine centuries before Buson's time (the continuity of Japanese poetry is a wonderful thing):
Our life in this world --
to what shall I compare it?
It is like a boat
rowing out at break of day,
leaving not a trace behind.
Sami Mansei (early 8th century) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 51.
Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935), "Corn Stooks" (c. 1880)
In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius now and then posts lists of the illustrious and not-so-illustrious dead in order to remind himself that all is vanity and that all living things, including the emperor of Rome, are evanescent bubbles. For instance:
"Hippocrates, after conquering many diseases, yielded to a disease at last. The Chaldeans foretold the fatal hours of multitudes, and fate afterwards carried themselves away. Alexander, Pompey, and Caius Caesar, who so often razed whole cities, and cut off in battle so many myriads of horse and foot, at last departed from this life themselves. Heraclitus, who wrote so much about the conflagration of the universe, died swollen with water, and bedaubed with ox-dung. Vermin destroyed Democritus, and another sort of vermin destroyed Socrates."
Marcus Aurelius (translated by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor),Meditations, Book III, Section 3, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor,The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).
I understand what the emperor is getting at: "Then stop, and ask, where are they all now? Smoke, and ashes, and an old tale; or, perhaps, not even a tale." (Meditations, Book XII, Section 27.) Yes, understood. But, as Marcus knew, this recognition is only the starting point for leading a good life and arriving at a good death. And now, Philip Larkin chimes in: "Death is no different whined at than withstood." ("Aubade.") Yes, understood as well. One will never be prepared. With an apology for being self-referential: "How little we know! It leaves you breathless."
In the meantime, I prefer lovely intimations. A crow passing silently overhead in the evening sky of autumn. A still pond and a departed boat. A seaside town in late September.
September in Great Yarmouth
The woodwind whistles down the shore
Piping the stragglers home; the gulls
Snaffle and bolt their final mouthfuls.
Only the youngsters call for more.
Chimneys breathe and beaches empty,
Everyone queues for the inland cold --
Middle-aged parents growing old
And teenage kids becoming twenty.
Now the first few spots of rain
Spatter the sports page in the gutter.
Council workmen stab the litter.
You have sown and reaped; now sow again.
The band packs in, the banners drop,
The ice-cream stiffens in its cone.
The boatman lifts his megaphone:
"Come in, fifteen, your time is up."
Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press 1979).
Joseph Farquharson, "Harvesting, Forest of Birse" (c. 1900)
