About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
Enlightenment is violent. I am jolted by the glimpse of how evil this world is and how one's moment of evil and another's moment of joy can coexist in the same fraction of a second. As I push my around what's left of my salad with this fork, someone divorces...is aborted...dies in war...loses hope, and (we) are powerless to stop it.
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
i can simply hope that evil's course departs from mine...that they bend away and don't meet again. but that is the hope of the naive. evil bends back according to its design. but thank God, no matter when evil comes, there is still good life ahead. there is always the promise of new life.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
i have been both overlooker and the overlooked. but then again, haven't we all.
(lines in italics from W. H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts")
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