Ulysses and the Scientists

Of all poems, perhaps the one that has spoken most (and most frequently) to me from all the world of secular literature is Tennyson's Ulysses. To me, it is one of the markers of that curious cusp of time around which the worlds of science and mysticism and religion met and churned alight the fires of this present age.

We meet the aging king, Odysseus of ancient fame and wiliness, grandson of crafty Autolycus, musing at his home. He wants something to do before the lights go out across his world.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

For him, the quest has always been about knowledge, not war or fame or fortune, not even progeny or technology, even though he has succeeded at both. It is the quest for the new, for the unthought-of, for the saving of things against the tide of night and silence. He sees the game coming to an end, and he is restless to just let it come to that end without a fight. He sees men as active participants in that game, not just pawns:

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

He does not dispute the Gods or dispute with them; he just wants to do what he can with his active end of the board. It is what impels his quest for knowledge, the idea that he can save something, do something, contend with God if he has to. The idea is not new: even the Old Testament is full of that. What's interesting is that he acknowledges both Time and Fate, Chronos and Ananke, just as the writer of Ecclesiastes does:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

It is the rash scientist who scorns such things or who tries to say that wonder can stem from science alone; wonder is a child of Time and Fate. It is the impulse that sets the wanderer off on his journey to seek what can be sought.

This Island Race

Yes, I've been reading a lot of Churchill these days. A quintessential leader for dark times, his caustic wit and declamatory style burn through the fog like a beacon on a hill. It was he who appropriated the phrase 'this island race' for the British, he who said, "Do your worst, and we shall do our best."

I am a man of two parts, geographically and literarily; born on one island and living on another, I find the poetry of the first almost sufficient for all things and the poetry of the second infuriatingly sparse in resonant metaphor. Which island is it that goes with 'race'? It might seem a trivial issue. But listen to this, taken from Shakespeare's Richard II, II(1):

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands, –
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Who could read this, born upon the 'sceptred isle', and not wish that it were true in every detail? Then again, my second island too has poets. One of them wrote these lines:

Peoples settled here,
Brought to this island
The bounty of these seas,
Built towers topless as Ilium's.

They make, they serve,
They buy, they sell.

Despite unequal ways,
Together they mutate,
Explore the edges of harmony,
Search for a centre;
Have changed their gods,
Kept some memory of their race
In prayer, laughter, the way
Their women dress and greet.
They hold the bright, the beautiful,
Good ancestral dreams
Within new visions,
So shining, urgent,
Full of what is now.

It is hard to choose between one island race and another, at times. One has a surfeit of history, a long and tangled tale told in dark rooms; the other has an earnest of history to come, but the shadow of doom upon it, that it might fade before that earnest comes to pass. It is hard; it is hard. Sometimes, though, it is worse.