Aspiration and Inspiration

I have a nice large lateral section of provolone with me, and several pleasant liquids which one might imbibe on such an occasion. There is bread. And it is quiet.

I think of all that is past, all that is to come. And I remember some of Robert Browning's words in his long and rambling Rabbi Ben Ezra:

For thence — a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks —
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink the scale.

That scale is of course a reference to the weighing out of men's souls. A heavy-laden soul would sink the scale; an unburdened one (or less-burdened one) would not. It makes me reflect on what 'success' and 'failure' have meant and have come to mean to me.

And that brings me back to both the first and last verses of that poem. It begins with

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

and it ends with

So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain of stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

We are all works in progress. Sometimes, the text is blotted, censored, savaged, missing, or incompetent. And sometimes, it is sublime or strange or both. I am inspired to greater heights by the realisation that what I aspire to be is not necessarily as great as what may one day come to pass.

Anthem

I got to talking with Gnomus the other night. We had a brief but poignant chat about what we really missed about the old place. We missed the students, the culture, the ideals most of all; the politics and the shady deals, the vulgar and somewhat tawdry attitudes not at all. The buildings were just buildings, of course. We missed the noodles. And of all things, we missed singing the Anthem, that uplifting paean to a vanished age, almost every Monday morning.

Yet, that age of mankind is not yet completely vanished, not yet vanquished or dishonoured. We still have heroes from foreign shores, we still have many sons and daughters from all the world's wide lands. We still stand together for the cause, with the hearts, the hopes, and the aims still one. It is a fellowship not to be broken, even if you have outside influences baring their malign fangs and inside influences like viruses trying to infiltrate a cell and spawn copies of themselves.

We will always remember the words of Robert Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be —
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Our lives are in His hand,
Who saith, "A whole I planned —
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid."

The years have passed: some have been kind, some less kind, some rather cruel. But there is still a fellowship. We might not all believe in the same God, or a God at all. But deep inside, there is the sense that there is more to come, that the best is yet to be, that there is a higher purpose or a higher calling — and even if there weren't, it would be our duty or our destiny to make it so.

50 Facts That Should Change The World

That's the title of Jessica Williams's book of powerful and intriguing truths. Others have summarised this list elsewhere. But sometimes it is also important to juxtapose various truths and see how they work with (or against) each other.

Truth #20, for example, says that cars kill two people every minute. Truth #22 says that 150,000 people are killed by global warming every year. Do some calculations. #20 will show you that 120 people are killed by cars per hour; 2,880 per day; 1,051,200 per year. In other words, cars kill almost exactly 7 times as many people per year than global warming does. And since cars also contribute to global warming, we should just eliminate cars!

Really?

Well, there are about 6.8 billion people on this planet today. I checked here. This means that approximately 0.015% of the world's population dies because of cars. And if you examine the ticker on that site, the rate of births far outweighs the rate of deaths from ALL sources of death. And nobody has bothered, as far as I know, to measure how many lives are saved by combustion-engine-driven transport every day.

If you were particularly callous, you might conclude that #20 and #22 do not matter as much as finding ways to provide a better life for those still living. But I'm not quite so callous, I think; as Donne wrote, "Each man's death diminishes me." Yet, I am also quite sure that most of us don't think of such things much. Even when we do, the breadth and range of vision required are too great for comfort, the ability to do significantly much seems too small.

The niggling voice of one Robert Browning, however, still speaks to me. He said, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp; or what's a heaven for?" Ah, that Browning. He bugs me all the time, an incurable optimist about humanity who also once wrote, "The best is yet to be; the last of life, for which the first was made."

40

It's the hill that all men reach; in Psalm 90, the years of our life are three-score-and-ten, and if by reason of strength they are four score, yet all their days are trouble and sorrow. Forty years is the mid-point of the titration that separates the 'growing up' from the 'growing old'. I will be at that mark in fewer days than I think. Perhaps, in fewer days than anyone else thinks. I give myself about two months.

I suppose what makes this particular year so rich and powerful in all its nuanced and secret ways (like Tim Powers's Drawing of the Dark) is that I've had so many brilliant and unusual co-stars. If this were a soap opera, it would be far more eloquent and action-packed than anything seen on the silver screen or the plasma screen. I've felt a lot like Harrison Ford though, with only two facial expressions at times: pained, and more-pained-than-usual.

After this year, there will be no such confluence of factors. The ladies will no longer be compared to those I met in my years in the convent on the hill; successive generations will have to bear the burden of comparison with the excellent quality of those who have graduated before. Arthur will no longer sit sleeping, awaiting the call of his country, a once and future king. Neither will clever Hans make light work. Evanescence will be the order of the day, and the numinous qualities of butterflies will no longer ennoble the assemblies of dawn.

And in days to come, the 370 men and women I have come to know with pride and humour will become legends in their own days. They don't personally feel like legends now. They may not ever feel they have deserved that right. (And I am somewhat limited in my capacity to extol their individual virtues without sacrificing whatever is left of their private lives.)

But from my hill, I look out upon the plain where ignorant armies clash by night and I see that what they have written in the water will still illuminate the shadows. I will remain, locked in one place and time of their perception and memory, while they go on to other things. As the years go by, everything fades.

As often before, I feel the ghost, that spirit of portrait-painting poets once named Robert Browning, looking over my shoulder. But there are no unkind words from this wraith – only a benediction of sorts. Rather, I head downhill into the valley of shadow knowing that my eternal Guide has nothing but the best for me.

Interlude 4: Self-Portraits

It is the curse of the man of books that when he tries to find words to express himself, he knows that many have expressed his sentiments with purer lines and better turns of phrase. Yet, there is a challenge in that which tempers the iridium-tipped quill and in the end makes it limn an image better.

But here is Browning first, from Andrea del Sarto, called the Faultless Painter:

I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-gray
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o’erlooked the world!” No doubt.

It is very close to a sketch of myself, or at least the part that interfaces with my work. It has a self-mocking irony that comes with being confident. Such confidence is not the confidence of success, but the belief that failure diminishes the self by very little if at all - the glorious attempt or the truth of self are, either one, sufficient. And having made myself uneasy by the recollection, let us move on to Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This is the other side of me, the part that interfaces with the world. It has no irony at all; it is genuine self-deprecation, not of false humility, but of consciousness of role. I am no Hamlet, no great Dane. But I make good filler, and I write reports and documents that augment the presence and capability of my superiors. Perhaps the greatest unease is evoked by Ted Hughes, though. Here is an excerpt from his tragic poem, Wolfwatching:

But all the time
The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance,
The incredible rich will, torn up
In neurotic boredom and eaten,
Now indigestible. All that restlessness
And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming
Of nose, is like a trembling
Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices.
Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening
To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered
By the hour-glass panic of lemmings
Dwindling out of reach? He's run a long way
Now to find nothing and be patient.
Patience is suffocating in all those folds
Of deep fur. The fairy tales
Grow stale all around him
And go back into pebbles.

Sometimes, this too is part of me. It is an itch I can't scratch. And so, as we stagger towards completion and the end of all things, I pray a lot that the journey will feel worthwhile - for while intellect accepts worth as abstraction, emotion demands value as instantiation.