Consider these aspects:
● The bedrock of marriage – You can generally recognize a good marriage, but it is hard to tie down the details. Generally it is made up of quiet, contented days succeeding one another for all the time allowed. But it need not be so. A good marriage can last through tempests. Consider the marriage of the playwright Enid Bagnold and Sir Rodwrick Jones, chief of Reuters: it was a continual tumult, each had several liaisons, yet they both considered their marriage the greatest success. On their 25th anniversary she wrote: “Oh, my beloved companion ………what fun we have had ……….I couldn’t live without you”. Behind the curtains of their life were “the entrancing gossip of bedroom life, the crackles of spirited annoyance, the candlelit battleground, the truces, the fun, the rage, the love”. But no description or explanation can easily capture the essence of a good marriage.
I suppose one must start with what Rainer Maria Rilke said about love – that it is a greeting between two solitudes. And then gradually, beyond greeting, beyond touching, those individual solitudes become one state that is solitude no longer and never will be again. In such a state those voices that tell all men, all women, that each of us is now, and forever, alone – such voices seem merely perplexing because they do not tell the truth.
● Growing older – As one ages, two opposing inclinations contend. The first is to relax, withdraw from the hurly-burly, take a little rest before the night of the long journey. The other inclination remains so far a little stronger in me, I don’t know for how much longer. It is summed up in one of my favourite poems, Sheila Wingfield’s good poem about the Chinese Emperor, Hsuang-Tsung:
Hsuang Tsung, great emperor,
Giddy and ill and old, carried in a litter,
Saw the stars sway,
His conquests and his arguments,
And his powers, falling into fever with himself,
Pulsed their lives away.
Bow to his shade. To be at rest is but a dog
That sighs and settles: better
The unrelenting day.
● Hurt no one – There is a simple poem – hardly a poem, more an articulation of the heart on paper – by the great cellist Pablo Casals which he once jotted down for the children he loved beyond even his great art.
“When will we teach our children what they are?
One should say to each of them:
Do you know what you are? You are a marvel!
You are unique! In all the world there is no
Other child exactly like you! In the millions
Of years that have passed, there has never been
Another child like you!And look at your body, what a wonder it is!
Your legs, your arms, your curving fingers, the
Way you move! You may become a Shakespeare,
A Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a Mother Teresa.
You have the capacity for anything.Yes, you are a marvel, and when you grow up,
can you harm another who is, like you, a marvel?
No, hurt no one, bring only the joy you can!”
● Every moment is precious – No man’s life is so obscure or ordinary that it is not filled with beauty and humour and strangeness and interest. At the same time, no great man’s life is so great that it is not filled with the most ordinary things. I like what was said of Bernard Berenson, the great art historian: “He loved life. When he was very old, about 90, he said to his friends: ‘I would willingly stand at street-corners, hat in hand, asking passers-by to drop their unused minutes into it’. So make every minute count. And every day is worth a poem.
