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.
Thank you for this, Paul. My daughter's middle name is Auden, which is to say that, yes, this resonated. Well put.