Lilac Wine

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largerloves
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black postcards

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I.
The calender all booked up, the future unknown.
The cable silently hums some folk song
but lacks a country. Snow falls in the gray sea. Shadows
fight out on the dock.

II.
Halfway through your life, death turns up
and takes your pertinent measurements. We forget
the visit. Life goes on. But someone is sewing
the suit in silence.


—Tomas Tranströmer 
The Half-Finished Heaven 
translated by Robert Bly

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storm

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Now the walker meets the giant oak.

Stone elk, it's crown is
furlongs wide against September ocean's
murky green.

Northern storm. Rowanberries ripen. 

Awake in the darkness, listening:
high above the tree top,
constellations stamping in their stalls.


–Tomas Tranströmer

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song of myself

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I have heard what the talkers were talking,
the talk of the beginning and the end;

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge, and urge, and urge;

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—always
substance and increase, always sex;

Always a knit of identity—always distinction—always
a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail—learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights,
well entretied, braced in the beams,

Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,

I and this mystery, here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my Soul, and clear and sweet is all that
is not my Soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,

Till that becomes unseen, and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best, and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age;

Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things,
while they discuss I am silent,

and go bathe and admire myself.


–Walt Whitman

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What Everybody Needs –Maria Popova

“The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.”

In 1994, Sherwin Nuland (1930–2014) — a remarkable surgeon and Yale clinical professor who in his nearly four decades of practice cared, truly cared, for more than 10,000 patients — received the National Book Award for his humanistic masterwork How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (public library), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year. It is one of the most existentially elevating books I’ve ever read — a inquiry as much into how we exit this life as into how we fill its living moments with meaning, integrity and, ultimately, happiness. Four years later, Nuland followed up with How We Live (public library), addressing the art of aliveness — that spectacular resilience of which the human body and mind are capable — with equal wisdom and warmth.


Shortly after Nuland’s death in the spring of 2014, Krista Tippett — host of the sublime public radio show On Being and enchantress of the human spirit through the communion of conversation — shared her talk with Nuland, recorded several years earlier. The entire episode is absolutely fantastic, but one particular passage both illuminates the heart of Nuland’s legacy and articulates beautifully an essential, elemental truth — the same one at which Tolstoy and Gandhi arrived — that we, both as individuals and as a civilization, so easily let ourselves forget:

Do you know what I learned from writing [How We Die], if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are… And when I say universal, I don’t mean universal only within our culture… There’s a lot of balderdash thrown around — “You don’t understand people who live in Sri Lanka and their response to the tsunami because you just don’t know that culture.”
Well, there’s an element of that — but, to me, cultural differences are a kind of patina over the deepest psychosexual feelings that we have, that all human beings share.

To illustrate the inextricable connectedness of these deeper human truths, Nuland turns to a maxim that scholars attribute to the first-century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden.” The phrase, the spirit of which Lucinda Williams echoed in her sublime paean to compassion, appears in the epitaph of Nuland’s excellent memoir of his father, Lost in America. He tells Tippett:

When you recognize that pain — and response to pain — is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people’s behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word?
Everybody needs to be understood.
And out of that comes every form of love.
If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears — disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you’re talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you’ve got to talk about love… And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. It’s almost like an excuse to deny our biology. We put it into pithy, sententious aphorisms, but it’s really coming out of our deepest physiological nature.

Listen to the full episode of On Being below and be sure to subscribe to this ennobling gift Krista Tippett puts into the world, then treat yourself to Nuland’s indispensable How We Live and How We Die. Dive deeper into the latter here.

 

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Maria Popova
brainpickings
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not to worry

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wish you were here

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