Reading is a good friend, whether the wind blows good or ill. There is not a single day it does not yield knowledge of interest, insights of value, moments of surprise, shocks of recognition and even visions of splendour. Reading graces, supplements, enhances and reinforces living.
I catch a glimpse of an old woman in Camp Street. She is bent and poorly dressed and walks slowly. She comes to a stone bench and sits down with an obvious sigh. She slowly unties a cloth bundle she has with her. It holds a number of things including a small brown paper parcel from which she takes a piece of bread. She looks at the bread carefully almost from all sides, and then begins to eat slow mouthfuls. She gazes into some far distance or some distant past as she eats. Perhaps the sigh when she sat down was a sigh of contentment. One of William Carlos Williams’s simple, artless poems comes into my mind.
To a poor old woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
To her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
- I read a story about Mother Theresa which I like. A journalist asked Mother Theresa “What do you say when you pray to God?” I don’t say anything, I listen.” “Ah, well, what does God say to you?”
“God doesn’t say anything. He listens. And if you don’t understand that I can’t explain it.”
- I am asked to give a talk on literature. In the talk I give examples of how poems can be relevant. Long ago, I was in a sugar cane field with Jock Campbell. We were talking about the sugar industry’s plans for increasing production and capturing a bigger market in Europe. We passed a group of cane-cutters in the field and Jock Campbell said to me as we went past: “You see those men – they are at the heart of what we are trying to do. Whether we succeed or not depends on them, not the Directors. Remind me to read you a poem about that.” And later on he read me Bertolt Brecht’s poem: Questions From A Worker Who Reads. Listen to it:
Questions From A Worker Who Reads
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished?
Who raised it so many times? In what houses
Of gold glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Phillip of Spain wept when his armanda
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Years’ War.
Who else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
- I gave another simple example in my talk of how poetry can be relevant and moving in life and, indeed, death.
There is a beautiful poem by the English poet Philip Larkin. It is called “An Arundel Tomb.” It describes the stone effigies of the Earl of Arundel and his Countess wife. The poet sees nothing extraordinary about the stone figures until suddenly he notices, “with a sharp tender shock,” that the Earl and Countess in their eternal sleep of stone are holding hands, faithful to each other forever. It is a beautiful poem and ends with the line. “What will survive of us is love.”
On September 11th all those years ago when the World Trade Towers came down a writer who was there wrote an account of what he saw and what he thought. And this is how he ends his account:
“Thousands died on September 11th, and they died for real; but thousands died together and therefore something lived. The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges, and, in particular, of two people jumping in tandem. It is impossible to tell, from the blur, what age or sex these two are, nor does that matter. What matters is the one thing we can see for sure: they are falling hand in hand. Think of Philip Larkin’s poem about the stone figures carved on an English tomb, and the “sharp tender shock” of noticing that they are holding hands. The final line of the poem has become a celebrated condolence, and on September 11th – in uncounted ways, in final phone calls, in the joined hands of that couple – it was proved true all over again, and, in so doing, it calmly conquered the loathing and rage in which the crime was conceived. “What will survive of us is love.’”
