Disappointment

I sometimes feel disappointed, am disappointed. One always hopes for the best; and yet, sometimes even the good seems so far away. Jonah may be on his way to Tarshish, young men may stumble and fall, the centre may not hold, the worst may be full of passionate intensity. Continuing from a previous post on Yeats and Chesterton, here are two alternatives.

This is Yeats, from The Song of Wandering Aengus:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

This is Chesterton, from Lepanto:

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.

You can go on a romantic quest or a redemptive quest. The choice is yours. In the former, beauty is the lure, and the rewards are an eternity of the fruit of that aestheticism. In the latter, duty in the world is the lure, and the rewards are often a shorter life and a more violent one. In the former, one seeks essentially to please oneself; in the latter, one seeks essentially what is probably worse for oneself and hopefully better for others.

I have seen, of late, many younger men with choices to make — a choice of activities beyond the classroom, a choice of loves, a choice of musical paradigm, a choice of literary approach. The hardest choice to make is that between an aesthetic paradigm and a living reality, because the two are often confused. It is the choice between 'nice to have' and 'good to have'. Both of those words have been dulled, made less effective because of decades of sloppy use. But their edge can be restored a little when you ask questions like these: "Is this choice nice to people, or is it good for people?" "Is this a nice thing, or is this a good thing?"

I remember my father introducing me to that anonymous quotation, "Good preaching is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." The former is what should be done with 'good', the latter is what should be done with 'nice'. I believe that if your words 'fork no lightning', then there is little point in words. It is this belief that holds me back from the abyss of disappointment: the realisation that my words have forked lightning time and again, that they have made a difference, that Death shall have no dominion.