Musee des Beaux Art

W. H. Auden

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.

A Hundred Visions and Revisions.

It's interesting how intense our visceral reactions are to profound poetry. My morning English class consisted of only T.S. Eliot and his lazy, dreary voice clouding the classroom with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. A hazy blanket hanged over the Shenandoah Valley as we analyzed speaker paralysis and life's continuous river.

The stream-of-consciousness  shown through his internal monologue evokes speaker empathy; we feel the trials and tribulations of a prudish, transfixed man caught in the daily routine of the mundane. Often, we can translate the literary into the literal and develop a higher sense of knowing, of enlightenment as we navigate through our own waters of life.

Certain times, however, we can interpret the literal into the figurative. Today, the valley welcomes rain, a ritual cleansing, a calm shower nurturing life.

It is difficult weaving through time recognizing all moments as a gift to be taken away so frivolously as it never ceases to amaze me the brilliance of the human mind and the fragility of the human body. As we all grieve in the death of another, try not to live everyday as if it is the last, only enveloped in personal aspirations, but aim to give kindness, joy, and comfort to others.

I look at my friends and I see an immense sense of friendship and dedication, a kindness that inspires me to continuously give this gift of warmth. I look back at the events of the last day and see a fusion of the community and wonder what life would be like if there was time for a hundred visions and revisions. Can we be more appreciative? More compassionate? How can we know, more than now, the hills where our lives rose and the sea where it goes?