"balanced on the edge of calamity"

I sometimes rise late in the night beset by anxieties, thinking that my heart is about to stop beating; that robbers lurk outside, seeking entry; or a terrible storm is about to send lightning down upon me. I am convinced my talent has withered, and I have grown old and foolish; that women laugh cruelly when they speak of me; and all my careful investments have collapsed, leaving me a pauper. I imagine that a terrible war has begun that will sweep away all we know, and silent lines of soldiers pass by in the night. I worry that lack of rest will bring my health to ruin.

And then, when I can bear it no more, the terrible, infinite depths of the night sky turn stone gray, and the sun rises again, lifting up above the horizon like a bright promise, and I realize the condition from which I suffer is but the human condition. Our solid lives are balanced on the edge of calamity, so much so that we do everything possible never to think of it, for contemplation drives one to despair. Despair that there is nothing we can do except promote the illusion that all is well, though we live with the secret knowledge that this is not so.

We wake in the grip of terror, the night telling us that we are utterly alone, our safe lives nothing but dreams. And our greatest fear of all--that we will be released from this world of anxiety and terror. The sun will not rise on the morrow.

--Sean Russell, Sea Without a Shore

---

Life is not so desperate as all that, perhaps, but it's a reminder of how easily our lives could slip into something else. Financial ruin, tragedy, disease, accident, crime: we don't spend a lot of time thinking about them, but they can happen in the blink of an eye. And yet, why dwell on it, right? It would be unhealthy to do so--I read the last sentence of the first paragraph as a sort of wry commentary on this: he lies awake worrying about all these things and then, to cap it off, he worries that lying awake worrying will be injurious for his health.

So why bring it up at all? I think in this context of the poetry of A.E. Housman, particularly his "Terrence, this is stupid stuff." The poem starts with a friend chiding him to write happier poetry, complaining that it's all about death and calamity. The poet responds, in essence, that there are much better ways than poetry to be made happy, to forget about life's hardships (alcohol, for instance: "And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man."). Poetry--his, anyway--is for dealing with life's realities so that, he concludes:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

When it comes down to it, this is about facing the world with neither optimism nor pessimism, but with realism, with something between the two.

tags: quotes of the day  books  poetry  "serious"  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit