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