Take “Worldly Wealth” by the Welsh poet Rowland Watkyns (1616?-64), with the subtitle “Natura paucis contenta” (“Nature is satisfied with little”):
“Wealth unto every man, I see,
Is like the bark unto the tree:
Take from the tree the bark away,
The naked tree will soon decay.
Lord, make me not too rich. Nor make me poor,
To wait at rich mens’ tables, or their door.”
Lord, Make Me Not Too Rich. Nor Make Me Poor'
“What are the poems one returns to, always taking pleasure? Or to put it slightly differently, what poems would enjoy the place of honor in one's Absolute Anthology (no fair including warhorses, chestnuts, and poems one is supposed to like)?”
'Without Any Hope of Fame or Money'
Friends and relatives, people whose judgment I actually trust, have urged me to move Anecdotal Evidence from Blogger to Substack and I don’t understand why. All I need is a place to write, the “platform” is of no importance. I’d do this in a notebook, like in the old days, if nothing else were available. Blogger is temperamental but after almost twenty years I’ve learned her funny little ways. As in a long, mostly happy marriage, one gets comfortable. I think of Michael Oakeshott’s definition of being conservative:
“. . . to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
'It Is Always Summer, Always the Golden Hour'
I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished basement. I take that image from my childhood home. The walls and floor were bare concrete. Stacks of newspaper and lumber felt flesh-like with dampness. Down there it was always chilly, even in summer.
In 1943, at age twenty-one, Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz.
Later in the letter to his mother, he writes: “I, myself, am, of course, well and cheerful, a normal person who accepts the present as though it were already the past, who is full of hope and not without a future.” He adds: “Will we ever be so young again? Life truly is short. And is art truly long?”
