To the gulping years

.. as if he had been

smuggled away acciden-

tally with no knowledge

of the act, into the future.

Michael Ondaatje

          Life is a series of surprises. 

          We do not guess today the mood,
          the pleasure, the power of to-
          morrow, when we are building up
          our being .. The new position
          of the advancing man has all
          the powers of the old, yet has
          them all new .. I cast away in
          this new moment all my once
          hoarded knowledge, as vacant
          and vain. Now, for the first
          time, seem I to know any thing
          rightly. The simplest words, -
          we do not know what they mean,
          except when we love and aspire.

I spent a pleasant couple of Saturday
hours in an al fresco lunch with a 
young scholar at the University, ex-
cited to gain a fellowship to pursue
a question of history that I knew
from my own study to be quite large.
Right before me were those qualities
of what we see as the gulping years,
ravenous for original assimilation,
for recapitulation as new knowledge.
It would have put one in mind, with-
out smirking, of Wallace Stevens in
a timely early portrait ~

Not less because in purple I descended

The western day through what you called

The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

One often has cause to think, in agrarian

pursuits, of a distinction between hunger

and desire, which rolls in more apparent-

ly with every growing season. These are 

not perspectives on our purpose in a hi-

erarchic chain, I do not think. Even if

they are not always known to each other

I have not found them yet to be sever-

able, and I do not think I will. But I

do not think Stevens or Emerson was

wrong; there is such a time as the 

gulping years, a seething roiling in

the world whose instrument is eternal.

We feel, we let it come, but like On-

daatje's random stowaway, we come to

cherish our lack of choice, admitting
to our use, more as a license to play.

Michael Ondaatje
The Cat's Table
op. cit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Circles

1841

The Annotated Emerson

David Mikics, editor

Harvard University Press, 2012©


Wallace Stevens
The Palm at the End of the Mind
  Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, 1921
Holly Stevens, editor
Random House, 1990©

Gerhard Richter, watercolour, 1964