Larkin about
I have to continue to despise the world because without hatred I am just a body floating in the ether.
That life is purposeless and absurd is apparent to any thinking being. We cannot escape that. Usually, our response to our being entrapped by the meaningless of our lives is to seek meaning.
I was thinking about how to explain what I meant by the quote above when I picked up this week's New Scientist. It carried a quote from Larkin's Aubade.
Larkin was a great poet. If this were not clear, the following would cement the truth of it for anyone who knows poetry:
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink.
The depth of honesty in Larkin's work, the insight into how we really do feel (as against the usual artifice of fiction), is what poetry is or should be all about.
The absurdity of our lives is that they dwindle to nothing. Whatever we devote them to is ultimately destined to become dust. But Larkin put his finger on a truth deeper than that: "It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know".
I'm a very similar man to Larkin (although by no means his match as a poet). He drowned in his hatred, and his fear did paralyse him.
And yet he could still write a beautiful expression of our commonality:
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And
someone running up to bowl - and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
and he knew that love is what matters:
The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love
posted by Dr Zen @ 1:11 pm
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