Repose

During our all-too-brief sojourn on Earth, we owe it to ourselves to cultivate a state of repose and dreamy reverie.  Repose and reverie are valuable in and of themselves.  But they also share a beneficial side-effect:  a person in repose and reverie is wont to leave other people alone.

There are far too many busybodies abroad in the world.  As I have remarked in the past, this is a product of the utopian impulse that has infected humanity in the wake of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment."  The busybodies possess a noisome stream of notions about how we ought to live our lives.

The rest of us just want to be left alone.

                    Repose

Repose is in simplicities.
Perhaps the mind has leaves like trees,
Luxuriant in the sensual sun
And tossed by wind's intricacies,
And finds repose is more than grief
When failing light and falling leaf
Denote that winter has begun.

James Reeves, The Natural Need (1936).

Paul Gauguin, "The Willows" (1889)

For busybodies, everything is an "issue," everything is a problem to be solved.  If you do not agree with them, you become a part of the problem. Rest assured:  within the soul of every soi-disant "progressive" and "activist" there lurks a totalitarian.

My response to busybodies and their agendas (for them, life is a never-ending series of agendas) is simple.

"Think as I think," said a man,
"Or you are abominably wicked,
You are a toad."

And after I had thought of it,
I said:  "I will, then, be a toad."

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895).  The poem is untitled.

Paul Gauguin, "Landscape at Pont-Aven" (1886)

The only "problem" that each of us needs to attend to is the state of our own soul.  I have yet to encounter a person who has earned the right to tell anybody else how to live their life.  What, then, is that sound you hear emanating from busybodies and from their symbiotic overlords and enablers (politicians, social engineers, and media mouthpieces)? Hypocrisy.

Good-bye to all that.  I shall join Ernest Dowson in Brittany.

                                      Breton Afternoon

Here, where the breath of the scented-gorse floats through the sun-stained           air,
On a steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours long and heard
Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer,
And the river ripple by and the distant call of a bird.

On the lone hill-side, in the gold sunshine, I will hush me and repose,
And the world fades into a dream and a spell is cast on me;
And what was all the strife about, for the myrtle or the rose,
And why have I wept for a white girl's paleness passing ivory!

Out of the tumult of angry tongues, in a land alone, apart,
In a perfumed dream-land set betwixt the bounds of life and death,
Here will I lie while the clouds fly by and delve an hole where my heart
May sleep deep down with the gorse above and red, red earth beneath.

Sleep and be quiet for an afternoon, till the rose-white angelus
Softly steals my way from the village under the hill:
Mother of God, O Misericord, look down in pity on us,
The weak and blind who stand in our light and wreak ourselves such ill.

Ernest Dowson, Decorations: In Verse and Prose (1899).

Paul Gauguin, "The Wooden Gate" (1889)

In due time, of course, we shall attain our ultimate repose and reverie.  A busybody-free bourne.

                 In a Breton Cemetery

They sleep well here,
     These fisher-folk who passed their anxious days
     In fierce Atlantic ways;
And found not there,
     Beneath the long curled wave,
     So quiet a grave.

And they sleep well
     These peasant-folk, who told their lives away,
     From day to market-day,
As one should tell,
     With patient industry,
     Some sad old rosary.

And now night falls,
     Me, tempest-tost, and driven from pillar to post,
     A poor worn ghost,
This quiet pasture calls;
     And dear dead people with pale hands
     Beckon me to their lands.

Ernest Dowson, Ibid.

Paul Gauguin, "Haymaking in Brittany" (1888)

Idleness

I think of idleness as a good thing.  I do not associate idleness with lassitude, laziness, or sloth.  Rather, I associate it with repose, reverie, and contemplation.

People who carry on cellphone conversations in public are in dire need of idleness.  People who walk through the world with their head down, peering at their iPhone while scrolling and tapping, are in dire need of repose, reverie, and contemplation.

These thoughts may mark me out as a reactionary anachronism.  For my younger readers, I offer the following anecdote in order to provide some perspective on my fuddy-duddyness.  Long ago, in my early years of practicing law, I received letters from clients and opposing counsel.  These letters arrived in envelopes that had stamps on them.  I would take a couple of days to consider how to respond to each letter.  I would then write a letter in reply, place it in an envelope, put a stamp on the envelope, and deposit it in a mailbox.  I'm not pulling your leg.

Yes, I come from an ancient world.  A lost world.  Hence my fondness for idleness.

                          Paul Gauguin, "Landscape at Pont-Aven" (1886)

                  Period

It was a time when wise men
Were not silent, but stifled
By vast noise.  They took refuge
In books that were not read.

Two counsellors had the ear
Of the public.  One cried 'Buy'
Day and night, and the other,
More plausibly, 'Sell your repose.'

R. S. Thomas, H'm (1972).

                  Paul Gauguin, "Cove Opposite Pont-Aven Harbor" (1888)

Your gift of life was idleness,
As you would set day's task aside
To marvel at an opening bud,
Quivering leaf, or spider's veil
On dewy grass in morning spread.
These were your wandering thoughts, that strayed
Across the ever-changing mind
Of airy sky and travelling cloud,
The harebell and the heather hill,
World without end, where you could lose
Memory, identity and name
And all that you beheld, became,
Insect wing and net of stars
Or silver-glistering wind-borne seed
For ever drifting free from time.
What has unbounded life to do
With body's grave and body's womb,
Span of life and little room?

Kathleen Raine, The Oval Portrait (1977).  The poem is untitled.

                          Paul Gauguin, "Upstream of Pont-Aven" (1888)

A Breton Dream

I have never been to Brittany, but I have an idealized, romanticized, late-19th century vision of it.  This vision is centered upon Pont-Aven, where Paul Gauguin, Paul Serusier, and other French artists lived and painted in the late 1880s and early 1890s.  This Breton world is a green world.

Then, to top it off, comes an ill and impoverished Ernest Dowson, the Decadent poet par excellence.  Dowson stayed in Pont-Aven in the late 1890s, writing despairing poetry and despairing letters.  Green still predominates.

I realize, of course, that the vision that I have conjured up has nothing in common with present-day reality, but I am content with that.

                            Paul Gauguin, "Haymaking in Brittany" (1888)

          In a Breton Cemetery

They sleep well here,
     These fisher-folk who passed their anxious days
     In fierce Atlantic ways;
And found not there,
     Beneath the long curled wave,
     So quiet a grave.

And they sleep well
     These peasant-folk, who told their lives away,
     From day to market-day,
As one should tell,
     With patient industry,
     Some sad old rosary.

And now night falls,
     Me, tempest-tost, and driven from pillar to post,
     A poor worn ghost,
This quiet pasture calls;
     And dear dead people with pale hands
     Beckon me to their lands.

Ernest Dowson, Decorations: In Verse and Prose (1899).  A note: "told" in line 8 and "tell" in line 10 are used in the sense of "to count" or "to reckon."

              Paul Serusier, "Breton Woman by a Field of Wheat" (c. 1890)

Dowson's poem is reminiscent of at least two poems by Christina Rossetti on the theme of death as sleep: "Life and Death" ("Life is not sweet.  One day it will be sweet/To shut our eyes and die . . . Asleep from risk, asleep from pain"), and this:

                     Sleeping at Last

Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over,
     Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past,
Cold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover,
          Sleeping at last.

     No more a tired heart downcast or overcast,
No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover,
     Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast.

Fast asleep.  Singing birds in their leafy cover
     Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast.
Under the purple thyme and the purple clover
          Sleeping at last.

Christina Rossetti, New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected (edited by William Michael Rossetti) (1896).

                               Paul Gauguin, "Flutist on the Cliffs" (1889)