No Surprise

I tend to be surprised by things like a caterpillar deciding to cross a street. Or a hummingbird suddenly appearing to look in at me from the other side of a window.  As for life as we human beings lead it, I'm afraid that nothing we do takes me aback any longer.  I am saddened, yes.  Surprised, no.  Not that I claim to possess any wisdom about how to live, mind you. It's just that we have never changed and we never will.

"How unacquainted is that man with the world, and how ridiculous does he appear, that makes a wonder of anything he meets with here?"

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book XII, Section 13, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702), page 229.

Here is another translation:

"How ridiculous, and like a stranger is he, who is surprised at anything which happens in life!"

Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742), page 285.

                 Things Ended

Possessed by fear and suspicion,
mind agitated, eyes alarmed,
we desperately invent ways out,
plan how to avoid the inevitable
danger that threatens us so terribly.
Yet we're mistaken, that's not the danger ahead:
the information was false
(or we didn't hear it, or didn't get it right).
Another disaster, one we never imagined,
suddenly, violently, descends upon us,
and finding us unprepared -- there's no time left --
sweeps us away.

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), Collected Poems (Princeton University Press 1992).

Fairlie Harmar (1876-1945), "The Bridge at Monxton" (1916)

For Marcus Aurelius and the other Stoics, Do not be surprised is not a justification for pessimism or cynicism.  Instead, it goes hand-in-hand with another injunction:  carpe diem.  (Which we heard about from Horace earlier this year.)  And carpe diem is not a justification for licentiousness or hedonism:  the Stoics had no time for ignoble behavior.

Still, how many of us can live up to the ideals of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus?  I know that I can't.

                    Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens

     As they sit there, happily drinking,
their strokes, cancers and so forth are not in their minds.
     Indeed, what earthly good would thinking
about the future (which is Death) do?  Each summer finds
     beer in their hands in big pint glasses.
     And so their leisure passes.

     Perhaps the older ones allow some inkling
into their thoughts.  Being hauled, as a kid, upstairs to bed
     screaming for a teddy or a tinkling
musical box, against their will.  Each Joe or Fred
     wants longer with the life and lasses.
     And so their time passes.

     Second childhood; and 'Come in, number 80!'
shouts inexorably the man in charge of the boating pool.
     When you're called you must go, matey,
so don't complain, keep it all calm and cool,
     there's masses of time yet, masses, masses . . .
     And so their life passes.

Gavin Ewart, Selected Poems: 1933-1988 (1988).  A side-note:  Philip Larkin included this poem in the Poetry Supplement anthology that he compiled on behalf of The Poetry Book Society for Christmas of 1974.  Now that's something I'm not surprised at:  it sounds like a poem that Larkin could have written himself.  A second side-note:  on men in charge of boating pools calling out one's number, please have a look at Derek Mahon's "September in Great Yarmouth" (which has appeared here previously): "The boatman lifts his megaphone:/'Come in, fifteen, your time is up.'"

It goes without saying (but I will say it anyway):  we are all Yorkshiremen in pub gardens.

Fairlie Harmar, "L'Aveyron" (c. 1932)

Yorkshiremen in pub gardens.  Or drifting on a peaceful pond, waiting for the boatman to call our number.  A perfectly reasonable way to live.  We all have something to bear in mind, but not to obsess over.  A gentle reminder from the Stoics:

"Manage all your actions and thoughts in such a manner as if you were just going to step into the grave."

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book II, Section 11, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702), page 21.

        A Commuter's Tale

A little late, but still in time
For the end of Z Cars,
After a drink in town with a friend,
On the last lap
The road downhill from the Tube,
Puffing at your pipe, puffing
Too at yourself.

Just at the bend, and almost home,
A -- what? -- a curious behaviour
In the chest, a rush-hour press
And stab of bodies, elbows, feet.

Well, at your age not unheard of
(Nor unread of, every morning),
Yet oddly, no embarrassment
(Must thank the drink for that)
At what portends a sorry solecism,
An exhibition you were brought up
Not to make,
But even some amusement
(Childish, suited to a childish mood)
As you remember:
Your season ticket, it expires today.

D. J. Enright, Sad Ires and Others (Chatto and Windus 1975).  Larkin also selected this poem for his 1974 Poetry Supplement Christmas anthology.

Fairlie Harmar, "Garden Gate" (c. 1921)

No Escape, Part Eleven: "Back"

The theme of this "No Escape" series is:  "Wherever you go, there you are." This remark sounds like a bit of contemporary pop psychology.  However, it may have its origins in a remark by Socrates.  This surmise is not based upon systematic research, but upon a passage from Montaigne (which I have previously posted):

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country. . .  Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

             Charles Ginner, "Lancaster from Castle Hill Terrace" (c. 1947)

Yes, all roads do lead back to ourselves.  That being said, I know quite well the siren song of escape.  It goes something like this:  "I should not be withheld but that some day/Into their vastness I should steal away . . ." (Robert Frost, from "Into My Own.")

                  Back

Where is that sought-for place
Which grants a brief release
From locked impossibilities?
Impossible to say,
No signposts point the way.

Its very terrain vague
(What mountainside?  What lake?)
It gives the senses nothing,
Nothing to carry back,
No souvenir, no photograph.

Towards its borders no train shrieks
(What meadowland?  What creeks?)
And no plane howls towards its heart.
It is yourself you hear
(What parks?  What gentle deer?).

Only desperation finds it,
Too desperate to blaze a trail.
It only lives by knowing lack.
The single sign that you were there is,
You know that you are back.

D. J. Enright, Unlawful Assembly (1968).

                                              Cedric Lockwood Morris
                     "From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London" (1926)

"Times Have Changed"

When a politician makes a public pronouncement, do you get the feeling that he or she thinks that the people to whom he or she is speaking (i.e., you and me) are credulous yokels?  Do you get the same feeling when a government bureaucrat or a media shill holds forth?

Do you notice that politicians, bureaucrats, and media shills have an infinite capacity to be both disingenuous and supercilious, no matter how sincere they attempt to sound?

It has ever been so, of course.  One Dark Age follows another.  Only the outer particulars change.

                                   Stanley Spencer, "The Bridge" (1920)

         Change

Times have changed.
Remember the helplessness
Of the serfs,
The inexplicable tyrannies
Of the lords.

But times have changed.
All is explained to us
In expert detail.
We trail the logic of our lords
Inch by inch.

The serfs devised religions,
And sad and helpful songs.
Sometimes they ran away,
There was somewhere to run to.
Times have changed.

D. J. Enright, The Old Adam (1965).

I harbor no illusions that we can dispense with this cast of characters.  I do know this: you can keep them away from your thoughts and your feelings. And, remember: they have absolutely nothing to do with poetry and art, which, to them, are alien and unreal spheres.  How fortunate for the rest of us.

                                Stanley Spencer, "The Roundabout" (1923)

"Of Growing Old Lots Of Kindly Things Have Been Reported"

As a preface to the following poem, I would like to state that I am not complaining -- nor will I ever complain -- about "growing old."  I think that complaining about one's age displays an unseemly ingratitude towards life. Nonetheless, it is entirely possible that I will one day become a querulous curmudgeon.  (Of course, I may already be a querulous curmudgeon and simply not realize it.)

All of this being said, there are certain unavoidable consequences of "growing old."  (Bearing in mind that one might "grow old" at 30 as well as at 90 -- it is all in the mind, you know.)  I think that the following poem by D. J. Enright recognizes some of these realities, while only sounding a bit querulous (though in a humorous fashion).

                          Robert Kirkland Jamieson, "Early Spring" (c. 1930)

            Of Growing Old

They tell you of the horny carapace
Of age,
But not of thin skin growing thinner,
As if it's wearing out.

They say, when something happens
For the sixth or seventh time
It does not touch you.  Yet
You find that each time's still the first.

To know more isn't to forgive more,
But to fear more, knowing more to fear.
Memory it seems is entering its prime,
Its lusty manhood.  Or else

Virility of too-ripe cheese --
And there's another name for that,
One can mature excessively.
Give me cheese-tasters for psychiatrists!

Of growing old
Lots of kindly things have been reported.
Surprising that so few are true.
Is this a matter for complaint?  I don't know.

D. J. Enright, Sad Ires (1975).

                                 Robert Kirkland Jamieson, "The Pool"

Enright's lines "To know more isn't to forgive more,/But to fear more, knowing more to fear" are strikingly reminiscent of a line in one of my favorite poems by James Reeves (which I have posted here before).

                   To Not Love

One looked at life in the prince style, shunning pain.
Now one has seen too much not to fear more.
Apprehensive, it seems, for all one loves,
One asks only to not love, to not love.

James Reeves, Subsong (1969).

                   Robert Kirkland Jamieson, "Snow In My Garden" (1932)