On standing sentinel, I think often of Auden's poem, (that I think we all read in high school), "Musee des Beaux Arts." I think about the first line, but I think the whole thing may be apropos. I'll past it below. I often check, more often than my Luddite sensibilites would have me admit, the New York Times website, and I find that I do so to bear witness. There's just not so much I can do about Vladimir Putin. Send him a nasty letter? But my daughter's college roomate is from the Ukraine, and his parents are in Kyiv, so, in that way, I am only a couple of degrees removed from that suffering. I was thinking about it yesterday. I had my bicycle's bottom bracket apart to repack the bearings, and there was pitting on the spindle that I was taking a long time to sand smooth, (not to mention make the spindle out of round, but everything can't be perfect can it?). "Here I am sanding, paying attention to these few defects in the metal, while an army invades a city that has done nothing to provoke it." I like to think there is some great, secret value in paying attention to the small things in ones own life, that somehow, that might create a cascading wave of good in the world, more than standing sentinel at the New York Times website, watching bombs explode in a short looping video. But as I sanded, I also thought of Auden's poem:
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;
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.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman 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
On standing sentinel, I think often of Auden's poem, (that I think we all read in high school), "Musee des Beaux Arts." I think about the first line, but I think the whole thing may be apropos. I'll past it below. I often check, more often than my Luddite sensibilites would have me admit, the New York Times website, and I find that I do so to bear witness. There's just not so much I can do about Vladimir Putin. Send him a nasty letter? But my daughter's college roomate is from the Ukraine, and his parents are in Kyiv, so, in that way, I am only a couple of degrees removed from that suffering. I was thinking about it yesterday. I had my bicycle's bottom bracket apart to repack the bearings, and there was pitting on the spindle that I was taking a long time to sand smooth, (not to mention make the spindle out of round, but everything can't be perfect can it?). "Here I am sanding, paying attention to these few defects in the metal, while an army invades a city that has done nothing to provoke it." I like to think there is some great, secret value in paying attention to the small things in ones own life, that somehow, that might create a cascading wave of good in the world, more than standing sentinel at the New York Times website, watching bombs explode in a short looping video. But as I sanded, I also thought of Auden's poem:
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;
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.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman 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.