August 10, 2000
My dear Greg,
I think about death a lot. Like all the time.
Third Socratic maxim (PIMS, 1950):
The life of a philosopher is a continual meditation on death.
What, at 19? And you know, in Philospeak, “is” always means “ought to be.” Ought we to be thinkers at 19 in the way we are at 70?
As I’ve become just this last month or so. Like all the time.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
Now I think (for the first time) I rather like that winged chariot.
Because these words are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air,
The air which is now [ah, now!] thoroughly small and dry,
Smaller and drier than the will . . . .
St. Teresa, Ah, end of exile!
And someone else, unpacking that a bit, might say,
Here in the body pent
Absent from Him I roam . . . .
Stranger in a Strange Land.
Lonely and afraid
In a world I never made . . . .
Yet rightly pitch my moving tent
A day’s march nearer home.
Home is where one starts from. (Ah, 325!). As we grow older (and older and older)
the world becomes stranger (and stranger and stranger), the pattern more complicated
of dead and living.
My days among the dead are passed,
Around me I behold,
Where ere these casual eyes are cast
The mighty minds of old:
My never-falling friends are they
With whom I converse day by day.
With them I take delight in weal
And seek relief in woe,
And while I understand and feel
How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedewed
With tears of thoughtful gratitude.
Not alone—not in the first instance—Jesus. Nor Jesus and the Father, Abba! He has spoken also through the prophets. Who came before. And after?
If I am half a thing (H2). In search of the tally-half (Aristophanes in the Symposium). All my life (and still) looking in the wrong direction. Greek heresy. What may or may not be. For a little while, caught in the form of limitation between unbeing and being. Count nothing of any value which can be lost.
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent,
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still . . . .
Ridiculous (absurd) the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
When I was in college I remember thinking how great it would be if I could write an essay consisting entirely of quotations (Eliot’s catalyst). Which is very strange, as there was so little of the Hegelian in me (in illo tempore).
Yet my senior thesis (20 pages!) was The Background of English Romanticism In German Idealism.
The romantic and the idealist, thinking and feeling, the mind and the heart, the two ruling classes of the Republic, wedded, like light and warmth (seeing and being) in the Analogy of the Sun, Germany and England—not simply Marx and Wittgenstein.
Oh, God be praised for the bush league of those dear dead days! Imagine now!
Then it would be time for the Big League. Lectures with footnotes, which had to be looked up (in Latin) and typed in quintuplicate. And I wrote to Jimmie O’Neill at Columbia School of Journalism (who wished I could talk as well as I wrote, you will recall).
The Beverly Hills Tennis Club is not necessarily the best place in the world to learn how to play tennis.
For those were the days of Poncho Gonzales and his booming Big Serve. And I never thought, the Beverly Hills Tennis Club?
And the virago, if ever there was one (terrifying!), with her once red hair piled high on her head, making her six feet or so, Assistant Graduate Registrar, that day I was really dragging, and with my hand on the doorknob she calls to me,
Oh, Mr. Macomber!
(I turn: Yes?) And I am weeping (once again).
I think you should know that your Father Fagothey
has written us that you are the best student of philosophy
he has ever had.
I can’t stop weeping. Those two alone. And all the worthies I have quoted, H2 in search of O.
A la recherché du temps perdu.
Perdu, perdu!
The waste sad time stretching before and after.
You may recall Socrates: Founder, Epiphany. The two possibilities: hypothetical, disjunctive. Either like going to sleep, and which of us hasn’t known that pleasure (at least after a hard day’s work), or more of the same, minus the body and all it entails (the world you never made). Leaping ahead a few centuries,
Hold converse with Sir Philip Sidney
And other worthies of that kidney.
In the end he’s writing music: no words. Pure feeling without the intervention (interposition) of any concept or picture. The only language in which it’s impossible to say anything mean or dirty.
And his last words (Famous Last Words):
We owe Asclepius a cock (god of healing):
See that the debt is paid.
Thinking only of the books—not treatises.
So as I now think much of death, like all the time, I also think constantly of the Governor (Guv), hoping against all hope (a) that He exists, and (b) just as I conceive Him.
The continual task of your life is to construct the house of death (Pharaoh).
Just for you, like that gate in The Trial.
And how do I conceive Him? A picture, no mere formula. Strangely, like Blackie at 3:20 or so (and he’s been there since 3:00), scratching like crazy at the door—can’t wait to get at me. And when he does, it never ends: he never breaks it off, never. I get right down there with him, to let him show it.
Crying, Stop, Blackie, stop! I don’t mean it. (Must we?). Still I tire of it, as of everything else, and break it off. Never he.
Any more than you can get that rag away from him. Though you swing him round and round your head until you finally fall on the grass (inner ear stuff) and he comes over to console you in his inimitable way, like Bjorn Borg (not McEnroe) leaping over the net (not as good).
What other picture? Even Jesus. I should rather say especially Jesus, most of the time.
Home is where I started from. And where I hope I’m headed, like Odysseus, nine long years. Says, In my beginning is my end (I). But also, In my end is my beginning (V, last line).
I’m always chasing rainbows,
Ending in the sky (playing).
Followed by primadonna stuff, arpeggios. Chopin, Fantasy Impromptu.
But he grew old
This knight so bold,
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like El Dorado.
The philosopher does not matter. It was not (to start again) what one had expected. What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity and wisdom of age (II)?
And even more getting there. (And leave the driving to us.) Autumnal serenity, c. Sept. 15. When the place bursts into life once again, after that three month “intermission of the heart,” and you are greeted by wild pandemonium as you stride into your first class.
Nice to have you back, gentlemen!
And off we go again. Into those realms of gold, with many goodly states and kingdoms, islands in fealty to Apollo, and finally that wild surmise (many years later, when H2 finds its O, silent upon a peak in Darlen.
The Pacific (first time)!
Not the message from Galilee, it would seem. And yet the whole place was dedicated to that message, now going into it 5th century.
Well, it was not what one had expected, to say the least. But,
What then, sang Plato’s ghost, what then?
It never ends (the soundless wailing). Label all that Purgatorio. Only a pleasant place, as Ms. Sayers reminds me (when I had already been there twice). Full of hope (in movement, unterwegs) and hope is the key to all “higher,” lasting pleasure, not balanced by its opposite.
No, I am not Alighieri, nor was meant to be: with Beatrice, Florence, the one true faith, and his mind, heart, und. But I have Proust and Eliot as my Virgil. Long known (“known”) and only now encountered, entering the final lap.
Abishag! Abishag!
Once again into the breach, dear friends (McLeod/WS). A way of putting it, not very satisfactory: a periphrastic study in a worn-out philosophical idiom, leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings (Jacob and the Angel).
Twenty-seven years now now largely (“largely”) wasted, trying to learn to use words, every attempt a wholly new start (right at the start) and a different kind of failure (in the end), each venture a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating into the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion.
One must be still and still moving. Death perhaps? Perhaps. I go in search of a great Perhaps. If only He’s mine and no other. More than Blackie, his most manifest creation.