Bravo the Humdrum – Part 3
“And in his own experience he may observe that his greatest liberty occurs (he can only see this in retrospect, since it vanishes the moment it is looked at) when he is least conscious of himself—when he is hard at work on some piece of research, focusing on the data, or when he is carried away upon hearing an aria sung by Birgit Nilsson, or when he is loving his wife, either passionately or in some simple act like bringing breakfast to her in bed. It will occur to him that one of the oddities of love (erotic, paternal, filial, social) is that its motion is outward and away from itself, and that it experiences this motion as joy: and, conversely, he may discover if he visits his psychiatrist often enough that there is an unsettling ratio between a person’s unhappiness and his concentration on himself.
And so on: on and on, until he shuffles, through debility and hebetude, toward that final horror that seems to settle it once and forever that there is discrepancy at work in things—this time the discrepancy between our dreams of destiny and our actual experience of dissolution—and that the Conqueror Worm has the last word.
But he might not, because he has looked around him at a thousand images, that it is not unobserved that life issues from death—that spring rises from winter, and the oak from the dead acorn, and dawn from the night, and Phoenix from the ashes.
These are all old moral saws. Nothing new here. Bromides. But then there is nothing new anywhere. The business of the poet and prophet has always been to take the saws and astonish and delight us into a fresh awareness of what they mean by discovering them suddenly in this image, and in this, and this. And the rest of us may see it all either as a pointless jumble of phenomena, or as the diagram of glory—as grinding tediously toward entropy, or as dancing toward the Dance.”
~Thomas Howard
And so on: on and on, until he shuffles, through debility and hebetude, toward that final horror that seems to settle it once and forever that there is discrepancy at work in things—this time the discrepancy between our dreams of destiny and our actual experience of dissolution—and that the Conqueror Worm has the last word.
But he might not, because he has looked around him at a thousand images, that it is not unobserved that life issues from death—that spring rises from winter, and the oak from the dead acorn, and dawn from the night, and Phoenix from the ashes.
These are all old moral saws. Nothing new here. Bromides. But then there is nothing new anywhere. The business of the poet and prophet has always been to take the saws and astonish and delight us into a fresh awareness of what they mean by discovering them suddenly in this image, and in this, and this. And the rest of us may see it all either as a pointless jumble of phenomena, or as the diagram of glory—as grinding tediously toward entropy, or as dancing toward the Dance.”
~Thomas Howard
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