Meanwhile, the birds are singing and the citizens of Harmony have rejected the school budget as too expensive, though it already includes drastic cuts in staff and student services. Apparently many people in this town are comfortable about damaging the prospects of our next generation of citizens, not to mention the present-day livelihood of the friends and neighbors already slated to lose their jobs at the elementary school. Ignorance and selfishness rule the day, yet nothing could be lovelier this morning than my strawberry plants, beaded with rainwater and loaded with fat white blossoms.
Last night Tom and I went up to the high school to watch our son receive a Latin award. Before the presentation, his teacher told the audience that, since the school's founding in 1823, its curriculum has continuously included this language. For 192 years, the children of farmers and loggers, store clerks and nurses, river drivers and carpenters, factory workers and unemployable women have been conjugating Latin verbs and scrawling clumsy translations of Horace. I wonder what words lingered in their minds or on their lips, in the days and years and decades after they had left school.
In his own smooth and easygoing translation of Horace's Satire I, the poet William Matthews wrote:
Now I'm back where I began, noticing how
no greedy man can be content, but praises
the lot of others, sulks because his neighbor's
goat's got a more bloated udder, and compares
himself not to the majority of men
but to the rich and famous. In that race
you're always breathing dust. The chariots
burst from the starting gate, and each driver
strives after those ahead of him, who pay him
no heed, nor does he think of those who chase
the clatter and clods of dirt his horses cause.
No wonder it's rare that one of them will claim
a happy life or, when that life's sped past him,
resign like a thankful guest who's eaten well.
Earlier this week, two little children walked into their house and found their mother dead. Never again will she sit on a hard chair in a school gymnasium, missing her dinner just for the pleasure of watching a teacher tell her children, "You did a good job." No, she's dust, and her children are breathing dust, and wherever that ex-boyfriend is right now--holed up in someone's musty abandoned camp or careening down the paper-company roads in another stolen truck--I guarantee he's breathing dust too.
But the hillsides are thick with lupines--pink, white, purple--and the sky is as blue as an eye. It's a beautiful day to die, or to weep over your mother, or to lose your job or your teacher. A beautiful day. So let us be angry, and let us also mourn. As the poet David Ferry wrote in his translation of Horace's Ode I:
It may be you who needs these rites someday,
And they may be disdained, O passerby.
Let us thank those who have striven against evil and ignorance--those who, throughout the history of earth, have loved the lives around them. In the words of Horace, let us "pray for a new song."
4 comments:
So well said. Here two evenings ago one police officer killed and another wounded, bushwhacked when they went to deliver an eviction notice in a residential area. The killer set fire to the house and committed suicide. The dead officer leaves a wife and two young children. And a gas station attendant who was run over a few days ago trying to stop a gas thief has died. Who she leaves behind the news reports don't yet say.
It would be easy to quote Auden again on his Old Masters, but instead what your words somehow bring more to mind is, again, Leonard Woolf:
‘I will end with a little scene that took place in the last months of peace. They were the most terrible months of my life, for helplessly and hopelessly one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all powerful. We were at Rodmell during the late summer of 1939 and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers, which like the daffodils come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty. Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.’
- Leonard Woolf, Downhill All The Way
"A new song"--please yes.
This news discourages me, but your words encourage me, Dawn. Thank you for framing the tragedy and crafting these words to give the event a shape at which we can look, not look away.
That was so quietly powerful it took my breath away Dawn. I am sitting here trying to process the litany of emotions your words evoked in me. It is a rare person who can seesaw despair, sorrow and anger, with hope, comfort and beauty and make them balance. You have truly moved me today and I thank you for it.
Thank you, all, for your sweet words. This was a hard post to write, and I couldn't tell, as I was writing, if the structure even made sense. Sometimes synthesis just feels like a tangle of rope.
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