In my 84th year the time for ambition is long past. Nobody gets a return match between himself and his destiny. The main tasks of life are already undertaken or nearly complete. The hectic concerns that ate up the hours seem not 
one tenth so important. What is called getting on in the world has long seemed a fool’s pastime.
The quiet pleasures, the private delights, matter much more now. Going out in society, to parties and receptions, to any gathering except a meeting between close friends, becomes increasingly a burdensome chore to be avoided at all costs. More and more I see the truth of the 17th century Japanese poet Tachibana Akemi’s ‘Poem of Solitary Delights’ which I first read in my twenties and which in those days puzzled me. Here are two stanzas:
What a delight it is
When, reading of wild exploits,
I hear about me daily
The well-loved sounds
Of a settled home.
What a delight it is
When after a hundred days
Of racking my brains
That verse that wouldn’t come
Suddenly turns out well.
I have noticed a surprising development. The beauty of ordinary things has again become more sharply focused. When I was very young every day revealed fresh miracles of a shining world. Then there was a long period spent in the press of strenuous ambition when one lived without revelations. But now they are coming again. I think even Samuel Beckett, the eternal fatalist, felt it in his aging bones: “What sky! What light! Ah, in spite of all it is a blessed thing to be alive in such weather, and out of hospital.”
Readers of my column will know that currently one of my favourite poets is the Polish Nobel Prize winner, Wislawa Szymborska. This last week I read a grim and beautiful poem by her about children dying very young – I wondered to myself why I was randomly chosen to live so long and receive so much on this marvellous earth and not them.
Return Baggage
The cemetery plot for tiny graves.
We, the long-lived, pass by furtively,
like wealthy people passing slums.
Here lie little Zosia, Jacek, Dominik
prematurely stripped of the sun, the moon,
the clouds, the turning seasons.
They didn’t stash much in their return bags.
Some scraps of sights
that scarcely count as plural.
A fistful of air with a butterfly flitting.
A spoonful of bitter knowledge – the taste of
medicine.
Small-scale naughtiness,
Granted, some of it fatal.
Gaily chasing the ball across the road.
The happiness of skating on thin ice.
This one here, that one down there, those on the end:
before they grew to reach a doorknob,
break a watch,
smash their first windowpane.
Malgorzata, four years old,
two of them spent staring at the ceiling.
Rafalek, missed his birthday by a month,
and Zuzia missed Christmas,
when misty breath turns to frost.
And what can you say about one day of life,
a minute, a second:
darkness, a light bulb’s flash, then dark again?
KOSMOS MARKOS
CHRONOS PARADOKSOS:
Only stony Greek has words for that.
Indeed, for some reason – perhaps because I am spending so much more time than I ever have with grandchildren so infinitely full of wonders and promise – I have become much more aware of the fate and needs of all our children. Nothing more important than taking care of the children – their basic safety, their daily welfare, their upbringing and education, their bodies undeprived and their imaginations let loose, the schooling of their minds, their futures safeguarded. I look around. There is so much that is depressing. Why is more not done? As a nation there is so much to set aside to give priority to the children. Let this government make this its most worthwhile mark.
