Take physic, pomp

I told my friend several years ago that I would rather be with her during the hard times more than in the good times, although, of course, I loved being with her any old time. That thought seems even more true to me now.

These are hard times for many people here in Dayton, Ohio. My neighbor came over yesterday and asked me if I could give him something to eat, since he had nothing. He's in his fifties, good, intelligent, sensitive, distressed, and thin as a rail. I made up some spaghetti and we had a good long talk, particularly about poets. He finished his food, then brought me a book of poems that a friend of his wrote while doing time in prison, poems that were so utterly sincere, such pure productions of the human heart right up against the very worst, that I'm still stunned.

Wordsworth was on to this paradoxical fact of the blessings of defeat in “The Poem,” as my friend calls it, the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” I also remember Solzhenitsyn writing about the same fact in The Gulag Archipelago. I believe this is very much what is being said at great length in The Book of Job, and especially, for me, when God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. Job has taken what seems to me a merciless devastation but in the end, we have a very different appreciation.

Here we have King Lear speaking from in front of the hovel in the storm:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

I feel that my own life is on the ragged edge and that my death will happen any day now and I see the horror all around me here, but at long last I feel certain that it works out far better than I could ever imagine.

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"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.”

                                                                                         - Robert Frost

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