And Time Stood Still

 "And time stood still...." [Link]

Life revolves around peculiar moments that stand in perfect stillness, and yet in that stillness, they influence the rest of life.  Such moments remain with us, and remain with the full import and potency of their striking epiphane and truth.  It's T. S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world."

Yes.  I remember intensely significant moments where time stood still -- but stood neither in stasis nor in movement.  The center scarcely moves -- the center of a turning wheel, and while the outer edge spins at a furiously ignorant pace, the center remains a tranquil point of potency and significance, even if we can't articulate the significance of the moment.

It's the center of the dance, a moment revolving within time, a moment between lovers' eyes, a moment not captured by the lovers but a moment in which they are captured.  They shall forever not live outside it.

It is a place only arrived at by all your past conspiring to bring you into it, and it is a place from which the future shall forever grow.  It's the "eternal moment" that the Romantic poets wrote of.  It's that moment which Peter Ibbeston enters when he understands the Duchess of Towers is his childhood love, Mimsy [Link].  Cupid finds his lost Psyche and wakes her with a kiss.  Pygmalion kisses Galatea as she transforms from cold, immovable stone into warm, living flesh.  And life is never the same.  From that still moment of waking, both Mimsy and Peter, Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and Galatea will move through their lives -- and exist both within that moment and within the future that the moment will continually unfold before them.

Yet -- and because -- it is life, we move on from that moment, for good or ill.  The moment stands still through it all, but its stillness moves in us.  Its potency is seen in how it drives our hearts to places we would otherwise never comprehend.  Yet even as it is moving us, we never quite lose sight of the moment.

The quiet moment stands with a truth, with a force that may not be denied -- or if denied, only dishonestly.  This has not been put more succinctly than by Eliot in Burnt Norton:

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, 
   there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not 
   call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither 
   movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the 
   point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only 
   the dance.

And what if you should miss the vital moment? What if you should make some other choice just then? What if Galatea should not love in return -- what is there?  Eliot again:

What might have been is an abstraction 
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Footfalls echo in the rose garden we never entered.  The ghosts of a life we did not choose move over the dead leaves.  The words we never spoke perpetually whisper in us.  The ghosts of two lovers who never embraced in complete understanding haunt our mind.

The danger is that such moments are pregnant with the lasting realities of life and love, loaded with all of their tragedy and their comedy.  That is why, as Sheldon Vanauken put it, "Honesty is better than any easy comfort." The still moment dwells only in honesty, in truth, no matter the outcome, no matter whether love is fulfilled or unrequited. Galatea may love Pygmalion -- or she may leave him.  And -- there are the masks of Comedy and Tragedy in Gerome's painting.

Pygmalion and Galatea. Gerome, c. 1890

 

In the midst of our best moments, we'll recall a truth left unspoken for fear of an outcome, and a lost moment parades before our mind.  And yet...in the midst of our worst moments, the ever-present still moment in which we chose a truth and received a gift of love presses us toward the center and relieves the spinning of peripheral and distracted life.

As the song says, you can try to repair the past.  You can try to become someone you're not.  Those attempts can't last. Gatsby tried: you can't get the past back.  Nevertheless -- here, there, always -- a certain eternal moment in the past stands, still and tranquil, within every present and future moment.

The life we chose.  The life we did not choose.  Both remain within the still moment -- a moment that remains forever "the still point of the turning world."  And eternity is merely that: a moment in time, standing still, shaping all the rest of time.

Salzburg II: Playing Mozart

Did you hear about the guy who was streaking in church?  He ran past the altar, but they caught him by the organ....

Mozart's Organ in Salzburg Cathedral

The cathedral in Salzburg where Mozart had been organist retains the organ he played, despite the cathedral having been bombed in WWII.  He was born in Salzburg, and everywhere in the town one finds "Mozart Balls."  That is, a chocolate/truffle/mousse spheroid with a stylized picture of Mozart on the foil covering.  People I met raved about them.  They also bought Mozart chocolate liqueur in bottles shaped like a ball.  I tried neither the solid nor the liquid.  But I had a ball in Salzburg with the people who were also at a conference I was attending.

Mozart Balls

The spirit of Mozart is palpable in this town, so you will see various music students looking for inspiration.  You can tell who they are -- all glassy-eyed whilst walking round with aspiration pouring from their organs.  However, you may find something actual beyond the ethereal or merely commercial: his house.

Looking for Mozart?

And in Mozart's house you can see his kitchen.  I didn't go into his house because A) I wasn't invited, and B) I heard he wasn't home.

Mozart's Kitchen, with a "Timeout Bench"

In an earlier post [Link], I wrote about what we hope to find by visiting the houses of the famous.  And that goes on here, too: the desire to touch and be inspired by something that the "Great One" had used.  A piano Mozart owned was in his house, but of course I didn't see or hear it.  What I did find (though not in the original) was something -- or someone -- Mozart scored: he doodled a young woman, Barbara Ployer, who was his favorite student.  But she had (it's a quote from the movie Amadeus) "too many notes," which even range into her hair.

Here's the Score: Mozart's Doodle of Barbara Ployer, the Only Known Image of Her

A statue of Mozart honors the hometown boy in one of the squares, "Mozart Platz."  When the statue was unveiled, the commemoration included Mozart's son playing his father's music.  Part way through the performance, however, his son began to play his own hot, new tunes and was quickly ushered from the stage.  So much for grateful kids.

But his ability -- his genius!  Everyone says it, sure.  To be truly convinced, just listen to his 23rd piano concerto (one score of which sports the doodle of, and which was apparently written for, Ms. Ployer) [Link].  Can't say more than that.

Leopold's Little Golden Rooster

Mozart Leopold Salzburg Piano concerto 23 amadeus Mozart Ployer

Time Passing

                                 Forgive my grief for one removed,

                                    Thy creature whom I found so fair.

                                     I trust he lives with Thee and there

                                  I find him worthier to be loved.

                                                                     ~Tennyson

Given but six months to live, it was after 11 months that my nephew, Michael, passed away.  He went more "gentle into that good night" than anyone might have hoped, but -- shall it be said? -- not without dying, which is what must be faced, what must be endured [Link].  Obviously.  Yet through those months, I saw bravery.

He distinguished himself not only in his stamina of enduring those 11 long months, but also in the dignity with which he passed that time -- and more.

He had been in a coma for a about a day before his passing, and so through the night.  In mid-morning his breathing slowed.  He then opened his eyes and looked momentarily at his parents, who had knelt by his bed when they heard the change in his breathing.  With what must have been an immense act of will, given his inability to move muscles and the fact that he had not eaten anything for 49 days, he gave one final nod to his parents in farewell, and within three seconds was gone.

One quote from the cynical House M.D. is, "You can live with dignity.  You can't die with it."  House, in this case, for all his Holmesian attributes, was simply wrong; this 13-year-old boy proved him so.  Science can't explain everything. It knows nothing of the spirit.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

                                   Hamlet (1.5.166-7)

An early entry in this blog concerns the red thread [Link] -- a thread connecting us regardless of where we may be within time and space.  I don't believe time or even eternity is strong enough to break that thread.  Perhaps the sole event possessing the power to break our connections with others is within an act that disregards human connectedness and Love that wove the thread.  I mean Love Incarnate, seen within daily acts of love which carry Him and connectedness to others.

The thread remains, but death?  Well, I'm not sure if it's slack in the line or an uncommon pull upon it.  Whether slack at the other end or a pulling, both hurt.  It doesn't hurt quite so much given that he lived and loved well, endured with faith and dignity, and distinguished himself in passing.  Should he have relinquished Love or human connectedness, the pain of that broken thread would be something more severe.  But no: here is the line, still connected, still present.

Going Hence....

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither....

Shakespeare, King Lear, V.ii

This blog is about journeys, including the last journey.  Shakespeare knew this journey somehow too intimately.

One of the things that distinguishes Shakespeare among even today's writers is his nuanced use of ambiguity.  He allows us to peel back layers of meaning that exist, often, within a single line.  His ambiguity in the word "their" in this quote from Lear shows Shakespeare's intimacy with the problem: that we must endure both coming into the world and leaving it.  Look:

Does he mean "Men must endure their [own] going hence"?

Or

Does he mean that we who live "must endure their [our loved ones'] going hence"?

Yes -- both meanings, I believe.  And it's an arduous thing to endure for both the one who departs and for the one who remains.

The character who delivers the line is Edgar, who leads Gloucester towards what he supposes will be his death.  Edgar asks his ward, "What, in ill thoughts again?  Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/Ripeness is all: come on."

And the dual meanings here are multiplied: we not only endure our own and others' going hence, just as we endured coming into this world, but we must also endure the people "coming hither" into our world who will offer only malfeasance (as so many characters do in Lear ); these persons are mere travesties of the attributes that make a human to be [link] in the most positive sense.  The presence of such people is all but impossible to endure once it's clear to us just what they are and what harm their presence brings.

My nephew, Michael, came into this world as one of the happiest beings I have seen, and he was ever so.  I have seen him delight at simple things encountered in this world, and I have known him to be as innocent a soul as I'd ever met.

Beaming Boy

He was a delight to play with in his infancy and toddlerhood, and growing older he has distinguished both his life after coming hither and his life going hence with a dignity uncommon to a young man.  Not to raise him above being merely human or to idealize, but he's been quite a fine lad.

I have known people who attempted to endow their departure (or, more accurately, their funeral) with a dignity that their lives failed to warrant.  That is a vanity decorated with funereal baubles -- a sham of empty ornamentation.  I have heard of, read about, and have met others who departed without a dignified remembrance -- with little-to-no recognition of the dignity with which they led their lives.

It is rare when these two balance: a dignified endurance of going hence at the end of a life lived in dignity.  That this balance exists with Michael has been emphatic to me as I consider his short life and his long endurance in passing.

His days grow short -- probably a mere few now.  And both he, and we along side, endure his going hence.

Michael, Thanksgiving 2011

 Michael, Dec. 2011

The Rest Is Silence

"And there was silence in heaven for about half an hour." -- Rev. 8:1

Whether or not you believe in a literal heaven, in God, or in something beyond is not the importance of the above quotation just now.  If you don't believe in such things but are sentient enough to read this quotation as you would read any other bit of literature -- by suspending your own, immediate responses and stepping imaginatively into the literature even if it has nothing to do with your own experiences or beliefs -- then read like that now.

What I notice is how this quote points to a recognition -- occurring, ironically, in the place that is the epitome of peace -- but still: it's a recognition that terrible things happen, things that even those who dwell outside the events, those who forever dwell with and in the Ideal, can understand to be devastatingly traumatic.

I'm not talking about the Holocaust, 9/11, a world war, or a tsunami, although remembering such events brings one to profound silence -- and should do so.  There is nothing to say.  That is precisely the point: silence is the only fitting response at times.

And so...my nephew, Michael, is nearing his death due to brain cancer after nearly nine months of slow decline.  He has thus far been gently lowered into that good night.  But even so --.  There is this silence where once was elation, amusement, wit, humor and laughter, serious talk, and young insight.

I have nothing to say except that silence is the appropriate response.  What exasperates is precisely this: too many words -- WORDS! -- have, over these months, been led out to battle a reality that came silently upon him, slowly took away the happy sounds emanating from his young life, and will leave an immense silence in its wake.

It is understandable, yes, that people have tried to find the right words along the way -- the right words to comfort, to empathize, to sympathize.  And some of these people have listened to themselves as they tried to articulate something fitting, and as they listened to themselves, they sensibly found their words were failing to deliver their good intent.  They would stop...and finally understand that silence was the thing they sought to express.  I thank these people not only for their empathy but more: for their good sense.

Others?

For these nine months I have read insipidly trite messages that people repeatedly posted for Michael on his Caring Bridge and Facebook pages -- all those lengthy statements about healing, that the writer just knows God will provide healing, and here are the scriptures to prove it....  God in a box: pull him out, like a spot remover, and advertise what He can do, like the Almighty Mr. Clean.

God, so far as I've experienced Him, is never so commercial a product as he is among many of these people of a faith -- a faith that is both unexamined and devoid of understanding that we all -- the just and unjust (if you must say it this way) -- share the same human condition.  That bit of understanding is just what too many people of faith are devoid of, especially in America.  They are too often thoughtless, tactless, without depth or sensitive understanding in a moment deserving nothing but silence.  Instead, there's the self-ordained, the self-justified, talk-show mentality with its free and freely-associated advice imposed on the situation -- as if everyone is obligated to hear their opinions.  One friend observed how these people's "compulsion to fill up the emptiness with banal, meaningless comments can be more painful than not."

The ability to wait in silence -- even while holding hope for a miracle and anticipating praise to be sung at such an event should it occur -- that act of silently waiting holds compassion and depth of soul.  It shows Negative Capability in the most positive sense.

Question: what is appropriate (let alone compassionate) about preaching a trite sermon on healing from Philippians to a 13-year-old boy who is losing every single thing in life -- his parents, all of his family and friends, his dreams for the future, his ability to play sports, his favorite toys -- and at the end of all these losses, life on earth itself?  Or what about a delivering a mini sermon on "firey trials" to a boy who is past moving, drinking without choking, eating, speaking his last words to his parents, or focusing his eyes in a last look at them?

It's taunting.  It's rubbing his nose in "what ought to be." It's to say "now, boy -- you make absolutely certain that you understand this last little lesson before you take your final breath!" Nothing whatsoever is appropriate in such words, nothing resembling empathy.  It is appallingly calloused, shallow, and indicative of the worst vestiges of faith.  To do such a thing speaks of what one book calls "The American Disease": an inordinate sense of entitlement.  And when that sense of entitlement is "sanctified" because it's from a believer?  All the worse.  They believe their words have a special warrant to violate a heaven-sanctioned silence.  At root, it is only pride and a desire for control.  You know what a martyr is?  It's someone who has to listen to a saint.

What is the worst part of such inane messengers?  They feel (not think, but feel) that they have a license to babble, which issues from the fact that they "mean well."  God save us from people like these who mean to do us good.  They don't think and, consequently, will not understand.  Yet they will smile at their own "goodness" and "understanding" while they spread more pain.

When I was yet in my teens, it struck me that a shallow brook makes a great deal more noise with what little water it has than does a deep and silent river.  But which has the greater power?  And shallow we have all been at a time, another time, and some time again.  I know my own lines here....

So it goes here on Earth.  But the quote: what's the scene in Heaven?

"...silence in heaven for about half an hour."  Yes.  The dwellers of heaven know, apparently, when to shut up.  Ironic, that.  Those -- having a clearer knowledge of Him and the answer to the paradox of how the giver of life is involved in the workings of death -- they know when to shut up.  There isn't some tres chic Archangel stepping lively and clapping to get everyone's attention -- then rattling about like a choreographer on the set of a musical rehearsal: "OK, EVERYONE! Thank you!  Great job, Suzie!  Now we're just going to have a moment of silence."

 No.  These beings know when to shut up because of their own humble prescience and understanding of Him who is just and sovereign -- and because of their simple recognition that terrible things happen on the earth, things that their words do not have the power to undo.

Job -- the guy in the Old Testament -- had "friends."  When they first came to Job in the midst of his devastating calamities, they did what?  "For seven days and seven nights they sat beside him on the ground, and none of them spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great" (Job 2:13).  They had the right idea that week.  They went wrong when they opened their mouths to deliver their little sermons and lessons.  They knew nothing of what God was doing.  Yet in their petty self-concern for offering the best word for the situation, each "friend" had to add what he knew.  They undertook to explain God and His ways to Job, nothing about which they understood.  And...they were dead wrong.  In their self-entitled, ego-driven, and uninformed "opinions" (the very pablum of thought), they cruelly increased their friend's suffering.

And think: is it not the absolute worst irony in Job's story that the only family member left to him was his wife (it doesn't matter that she was a woman; it only matters what her advice was)?  At the start of his troubles, she simply tells her husband to "curse God and die."  Helpful advice, that.  This is who remains for Job beyond his "friends."  And such people most often think they are serving God by their words....

When Jesus went to his friend, Lazarus', grave, we are told merely "Jesus wept."  An action only.  St. Paul remarked, "rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep."  Again, action only.  What about words?  And what about the woman caught in the very act of adultery? (Um...if it takes "two to do," where'd the guy go?  Setup, eh?)  There she sat, moments before suffering a horrible death from stones thrown by the religious elders (ironic, is it?  No -- that's invariably typical ).  And -- from Jesus she hears merely, "Neither do I condemn you.  Go and sin no more."  And then silence.  Silence to live in or silence to die in, but silence.

And Jesus' own suffering?

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth

                               (Isaiah 53)

Tradition is that we should remember horrible events, remember those who perished and those who sacrificed, with a moment of silence.  Charles Hamilton Sorley, a British soldier and poet of WWI killed on 13 Oct. 1915, wrote this:

When you see the millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember.  For you need not so.

This is precisely why speaking is prohibited and silence enforced at the great ossuary at Douamont, where people still today take new-found bones of soldiers of WWI, lost in the mud of the fields outside Verdun.  Beyond the silence there, the only occasional sounds you might hear are the aching strains of Faure's Requiem...itself largely a lament for our condition and prayers for God's mercy in it.

The Ossuary at Douamont, France (Source: Naidoo)

In remembering the victims of 9/11 this year, there were "six silences and a prayer" [Link].  Paul Simon sang his old song -- movingly, memorably -- "The Sounds of Silence" [Link].

Terrible things happen on this earth -- whether to a throng of people in some great and sudden conflagration or to one young boy in the lingering decline of an insipid disease.  They happen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia..., on the highway outside, at the house next door.  As someone once said (in a quote given in an earlier posting), "sometimes the mountains have nothing to say."  So should it be.  Shakespeare, who lost his young son, Hamnet, also knew this. While grieving for his own son, he wrote the play Hamlet and gave this as the dying Hamlet's last words: "The rest is silence."

Into Thin Air (1)

 17 July: 12,800 ft.  Near Independence Pass

The mountains of Colorado (and I assume mountains elsewhere) seem to exist without change.  Obviously, they are the same as they were when I went to college here.  Well, except for one mountain in Clear Creek Canyon by Idaho Springs which some company is literally removing in order to extract a mineral and leaving a massive mess of loose gravel in its place.  It would be nice if someone would force the company to "put it back," but two problems would result: 1) HOW?  2) Some poor workers would be set to gluing the bits back together for an eternity, a task I could not wish on anyone except the Ass-of-a-CEO and the derelict and weasely politician(s) who authorized moving the mountain in the first place.

Otherwise, the mountains stay pretty much the same.  They tower in their magnificence and inspire in their majesty (as everyone says).  Yes.  They do.  My experience is that they speak volumes to us at one moment and then, at another moment (perhaps when you most need a perspective, a view on life, some inspiration), they face you with stark indifference.  One person I knew put it this way: "Sometimes the mountains have nothing to say."  A mountain's indifference to us is not a sneer.  It's not malevolent.  It's simply that you are no factor within nature's on-going equations.

But you can get caught in the equation.

They can fall on you or let you fall off of them with no concern whatsoever for your fate.  What seems unbelievable, Ueli Steck, humble carpenter and climber extraordinaire who set 3 "time-climb" records on the north face of the Eiger among many other magnificent feats, fell in April of 2017 from Nuptse, near Everest.  In June 2011, a climbing accident in the French Alps left 6 people dead (men, women, and a teen) after they all fell from a high snow field [Link].  Dr. C. Everett Koop's son also died in a mountaineering accident: a rock fell on his leg, trapping him, and he bled to death.  On 6 Oct. 1979, the day I first made the summit of Long's Peak (14,259 ft.), one climber, Charles Nesbit [Link], died in a fall from Lamb's Slide, a steep snowy trough to the left of Long's Diamond Face.  The snow moved — so a ranger told me that day: if Nesbit had been roped to his fellow climbers, they all would have gone.  I remember seeing his friends late that day as they left the ranger station, silent, staring — blank.  And the mountains stand, indifferent to whatever happens to whoever is on them.

Long's: A Serious Presence

A More Trivial Presence atop the Serious Presence
6 Oct. 1979

While hiking in Colorado last week, I thought about the unchanging nature of the mountains — mountains as a constant factor in life's equations.  Yes, over-worn truths offer the usual emotional fluff about spring after winter, that even as winter comes, the evergreens, covered in feet of snow, stay green beneath.  The bright green lichens under all that snow — they will emerge, still green, once again.  The aspen will go into leaf again, the flowers bloom.  But it's the mountains' massive presence that is, for me, the constant.  And their constant includes both their indifference and eloquence.  These are part of their personality.

From under the Snow

But it was while hiking around the Maroon Bells that I had a sudden epiphany, an awareness not of a constant but of change.  It is we who change with that sort of thing Wordsworth spoke of in "Tinturn Abbey" — when, in the moment of writing the poem, he looked back upon "the thoughtless type of youth" he had been, and the man he was years later.

A "Deadly" Marmot at the Foot of Maroon Peak (Very Dangerous Photo: author)

What struck me was how we pass through generational lines without realizing it.  It's like when you read a book you're absorbed in: you look at the clock and three hours have just passed in but a moment.  You live, go about daily stuff, absorbed in it all, and then look up at the clock of life and . . . you've become an older you.  One moment, you're 20.  Then you're 35.  When did that happen?  And then you're 50.  When did that crap happen?!  And, no, you can't go back.  At 19, I trudged up Long's in boots so heavy they should only be used to hold down a house in a tornado.  Today, I can't imagine how it was done.

My Retired Dogs, Weighing a Mere 36 Tons

Somehow we assume we're constant, unchanging.  We look ahead at others, see them a generation ahead of us and wonder vaguely (if we think about them at all) what it's like to be that age, what the "rules" are, and what few prospects for fun are left to them.

The generation ahead?  I remember that when I was very young, I looked at my baby sitter and wondered what it would be like to be so old (she was 17) — unbelievably, she no longer played with toys!  Or I looked at my high school teacher and thought, "man... shouldn't he retire?"  He was, I realize now, only in his 40s.  And my dad: what happened to him?  And I realize I am now the age he was when I had been in college in Colorado and climbing mountains.  And I look up and -- I've crossed the line to that generation.  No one welcomed me or explained the rules, the proper decorum.  I just continued being myself (for better or worse).

1970s: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

1980s: Lookout Mt., GA -- It's Just Not the Rockies

 1990s: Alone in Roosevelt Nat'l. Forest as Seen though the Wayback Machine

Then we see someone younger give us that look — obviously thinking the things we once thought about our elders.  We answer mentally, "don't you DARE think that.  I'm still young, and, yes — a wrinkle here and some grey there — but ... inside it's all the same.  I'm still green under this snow, babe.  Just more experienced."

There's no initiation.  You don't hear a chime on a clock striking the next generation.  You don't see a sign on the mountain trail marking the fact you've reached "50's Peak" — or have perhaps fallen off it.  You just look round and find others reminding you of the fact.  But inside ... you're still 19, still at times Wordsworth's "thoughtless type of youth," but now more careful on the narrows, the peaks, the snow fields.  Where's the right of passage across a generational line?  I don't really care to have one.  The less said....

2000s: 20s or 50s?  Both and Neither

Nearly 2020: Down from the Hornli Ridge, Matterhorn

It was perhaps being in Aspen that made me think of all this (or maybe it was my wheezing away on a trail somewhere above 12,000 feet).  In Aspen, you see a nubile young woman and realize — "no, that woman is actually about 65, just dressed like a teenager."  Or some young buck — "but no, that dude is 70!"  And it's not one, but everyone: men, women, and -- well, no, not children (who somehow dress more maturely than they are, but that's a different blog entry).

Aspen's a place where fighting age is the sport everyone competes in.  Apparently it's a crime to age there.  Cool.  I'd like to live somewhere where people are simply blind to your age.  But that's definitely not Aspen.  Nope.  People there seem to be fighting age because they are too aware of it.  It's a great town for denial, and every clothing, sports, ski, jewelry, or health-product shop will help you with that denial.  While I myself wouldn't "go gentle into that good night" (but rather continue to climb mountains literal and metaphorical), still — I can't try to fool myself that I look even 30.

The mountains don't change.  They are a constant.  They watched me at 18, at 30, at...well, I'm not going to tell you.  But change...?  Change is the constant for humans.  It happens while you're sleeping.  Even so, there's something in us like mountains under the snow: there's still a spring beneath, something that's evergreen.

Age Growing Old, perpetual youth, 

Optimism, Pessimism, and Realism

Thomas Hardy called himself a meliorist (someone who believes everything is getting better) although many people saw him as anything but that -- he wasn't even a realist but a pessimist.  One of his poems, for instance -- "The Darkling Thrush" -- is about the old century waning as a thrush sings at the dusk of its last evening -- Dec. 31st 1899.  Hardy hears the bird sing of

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

No hope for a brand new century?  Grim.  Hardy's pessimism may echo from such poems as Shakespeare's more optimistic lines in Sonnet 29, a poem beginning in despair:

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my *bootless cries,    [*useless]
And look upon myself and curse my fate....

It doesn't end there, but turns more hopeful:

*Haply, I think on thee, and then my state,    [*by chance]
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.

Nice.  Suddenly "things is better."

Shakespeare, I think, was more of a Realist although he had his Pessimistic days (Hamlet -- dark and brooding over human fates, was written after Hamnet, Shakespeare's son and twin to Judith, died.  And King Lear is probably the darkest play in English literature).  But was he a Realist?  Well, Shakespeare, after all, could write lines like "love and reason keep very little company nowadays" and "young men's love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes."  There's some Realism for you.

But since we're working backwards from Hardy to Shakespeare, let's look at something from just before Shakespeare's day: Henry VIII's armour, preserved in the Tower of London.

A Man's Optimism is His Castle

You may just notice the codpiece.  Yes.  Well.  Some men may view that as pessimistic.  Let us not befriend them.  Others may see it as realistic.  Let us not befriend them.  But really.  As Mae Western-Holly-Wood (16th-century movie actress) asked, "Is that a cannon in your codpiece or are you just glad to see me?"  As my good friend Major Hurt observed the other day, "it's Henry the VIIIth because the codpiece was only 1/8th full."  Is the glass half empty or half full?  Neither: only an 8th....  It's sheer, blind Optimism -- hopeful winking with ego-wanking.

And please note: the realism of my friend can pose a Major Hurt in only one case: if he leads you in your workout.  He flies helicopters, but he's solid as a tank with a perpetual motion machine in him.  One day he'll be merely a General Hurt.  Just so he's past a Private Hurt, which could be major.  Realistically, he's the man you want in a situation that looks optimistically like it is going to turn pessimistic.

Major Hurt in His Heli

The thing is, we seem to grasp for excuses when our optimism comes face-to-face with the real.  One excuse, from Garrison Keillor, speaks of men having to pee when ice fishing: "When it's cold out, all men are created equal."  Realism.

Any of Those Purported Health Benefits of Optimism Here?

I have no real point in all this (that's Realism); you shouldn't hope for more than that (which is Optimism).  But I do think (without undo Pessimism) that we humans will choose any of the three that would suit us in a single moment, as with the lads pictured above -- or with Henry, Shakespeare, or Hardy.

How so? Could we possibly choose Pessimism in any situation?  Well, yes we could!  Just try having a Pity Party and inviting Optimism over to entertain.  Doesn't work.  We would need Pessimism to come over to start a fight to straighten things out.  And Realism?  True: he could come over and at least be persuaded to admit there is a darker side to things.  But for a Pity Party, Pessimism is your true friend.  Great party!

To celebrate a really big event, however, it's Optimism you want.  Sir Optimism, apparently, was an armour maker to royalty in the early 1500s, protecting nether egos with steeled and bright opinion.  If Henry had invited either Realism or Pessimism to his party, it would have been off with his cod.

But what about Reason?  Seldom invited.  Boring lad at a party.

Reason and humans keep very little company nowadays.