Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate

I came across this lovely bit of Samuel Johnson - not a writer I would normally look to for lyrical, psalm-like meditations. He's a century late for that exquisite moment when Donne and Herbert were unfurling their quiet splendour, and a century early for lush, Romantic introspection, or tender Victorian lamentation. And indeed this bit is not a lyric poem at all, but the last 26 lines of his long poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes: the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated” (published 1749) - which Walter Scott and TS Eliot both thought his best work. Considering that the poem's opening lines inauspiciously bid the reader “survey mankind, from China to Peru,” its closing lines come as a sweet shock. The theology here is probably a conversation for another post, but I hope you enjoy the poetry here this Friday morn.

Where, then, shall Hope and Fear their objects find?
Must dull suspense corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise,
No cries invoke the mercies of the skies?
Inquirer, cease! petitions yet remain,
Which Heaven may hear, nor deem Religion vain.
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice;
Safe in His power, whose eyes discern afar
The secret ambush of a specious prayer,
Implore His aid, in His decisions rest,
Secure whate'er He gives, He gives the best.
Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd;
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind Nature's signal of retreat:
These goods for man the laws of Heaven ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain;
With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.

Upon the moon's meek shine

I did manage to get up this morning at about 5:20am, put on my glasses and my uggboots and stumble blearily down the stairs to watch the moon turning from white to red. Like all things lunar, it was slow and beautiful and mysterious. A web search for “eclipse” turns up a deal of guff about vampires, but it also turns up this splendid poem by Thomas Hardy. How indeed shall we link such sun-cast symmetry with the torn troubled form of Earth?

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

Bloom, waterlover

Here's a man who knew what water was, and what words were. Happy Bloomsday!

“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”

From Ulysses, by James Joyce

Where any-angled light would congregate

I like that Philip Larkin, who likened churchgoing to funereal tourism, can yet imagine a religion, can raise his glass to something infinite.

This is “Water.”

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

This is water

Some commencement speeches earn the status of legend. One of those belongs to David Foster Wallace. He spoke at Kenyon College in 2005 (read it here). 

He starts with a story about two young fish swimming. An older fish asks, as they swim by, “how's the water?” After a pause, one young fish turns to the other and says, “what the hell is water?” His speech, deliberately not “grandly inspirational,” but urgent and honest, begs the graduates not to forfeit consciousness as they grow into their prosperous, respectable lives. Bluntly and earnestly, he argues that the authentic life is about attention: how you attend to life, and to other people; how you school your thoughts into worship of “some infinite thing” that matters; how to keep telling yourself “this is water, this is water.” 

Three years after giving this astonishing speech, Wallace committed suicide.  I don't know how, nor would I speculate about why, yet I can't help but wonder if he drowned.