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Quote of the Day: The Things We Leave Behind
Today I’m 82 and I just had my house painted. As I was looking it over yesterday, I thought to myself, “Well, I won’t have to do that for another twenty years.” But then a disquieting but also strangely satisfying thought came to my mind: According to Social Security actuary tables, I only have 7.26 years left, and that means I will surely never have to have my house painted again.
Think about that: I’ll never have my house painted until the end of time, when the stars go out one by one and the universe itself finally pffts out of existence.
I suppose I ought to stop and celebrate such an important event in my life, but it’s just darned hard to celebrate a new coat of paint, despite its metaphysical implications.
But that paint job has inspired me. So from now on, I think I’ll note each last thing as I think it will occur.
- “That’s the last time I’ll drive through Cody, Wyoming.”
- “That’s the last time I’ll dance the hully-gully.”
Now I am totally inspired, and in fact the only vessel that will contain my inspiration, perhaps much to your disappointment, is poetry in rhymed couplets. But bear with me. I’ve got some good rhymes in here.
- Before my eyeglass hinge requires another drop of oil,
I’ll have shuffled off this mortal coil. - Before my Black and Decker drill goes bust
I myself will bite the dust. - Bob will continue to chase a darting rabbit
Long after I’ve kicked the oxygen habit. - Before my microwave comes to harm,
I probably will have bought the farm. - And here is what I almost failed to foresee:
My underwear will go on their merry way without me. - And when my days are few, I won’t be ‘round
To watch my Dole bananas go to brown.
My take on last things segues naturally into my contribution to Ricochet’s official Quote of the Day feature: Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. (Last night two minutes after midnight, Arahant, who manages the Quote of the Day feature on Ricochet, sent me a message that I’m up today. How’s that for dedication to his job? 3:02 a.m. his time and he’s on the job working for Ricochet.)
Whenever I read Do Not Go Gentle, an odd thought passes through my mind: Dylan Thomas is a pest. In the poem, his father seems to be on his deathbed (outside the poem, his father actually died a year or two later, along with Dylan himself), but his son badgers his father to resist dying. Not only that, but Thomas pressures his father even further by calling his attention to men who did the right thing when they raged against the dying of the light.
What a pest, that Dylan Thomas. I hope my son won’t pester me to struggle against the inevitable when all I want is to sink into the soft pillow of oblivion.
At any rate, here is one of Britain’s greatest 20th-century poems (written by a Welshman).
Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should rage and rave at close of day,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
__________________
Although the poem is clear in its overall theme, it’s obscure. as almost all of Dylan Thomas’s poems are, in some of its details. Look at that awkward spot at the end of the first line of the fifth stanza. Thomas seems to have elided the word “that” because he doesn’t fit the meter, but the construction is so obscure it’s hard to say what he’s after.
Other obscure imagery (“frail deeds have danced in a green bay”?) has been fodder for two generations of English graduate students.
But we must not allow my small-minded carping to mislead us. Do Not Go Gentle belongs up there in the pantheon of great British poems. For me, clarity counts for a lot — but not for everything. And a great poem can overcome a modest lack of precision and clarity. I think Do Not Go Gentle does that.
Published in General
Jim is older than I, didn’t turn 82 until March. Kent will be 82 this month.
Kent, I hope you cheat the actuarial table by light years. Happy birthday and thanks for including Bob in your couplets and photo.
At last! I’ve achieved 1st Place at something.
I’m not sure what year it was. I suspect my father was in his late 60’s, maybe early 70’s. My step-mother called me to see if I could talk sense into him. “You’re the only one he listens to,” she said.
I doubt my father ever liked doctors. He had polio when he was eight and spent that year in an iron lung and then slowly recovering. The doctors said he would never walk again, but he didn’t spend to long in a wheelchair. His mother worked with him day-after-day until he could walk again, and until he could live a normal life. He recovered enough to go into the army and be a policeman for many years until his retirement. When he retired, he moved down to Missouri, near the Arkansas border. My parents had divorced maybe seven years before that, so he was single at the time.
After a few years, he met a woman from the area, and remarried. Growing up in that area, she had spent time in both Missouri and Arkansas. Unfortunately, in one of her previous health crises in Arkansas, she had been given blood. That was during the time of Bill Clinton in Arkansas. Anyone remember the scandal about the blood of prisoners, tainted with HIV and Hepatitis C? She received Hep C. She wound up having to quit her job because of health problems, and Dad spent a lot of time taking her to or visiting her in hospitals. Their only income at the time was his retirement.
While at one of the local hospitals for his wife, he wound up eating at the cafeteria, and the burger he had was undercooked. He got E. coli. His kidneys were shutting down. He was dying. And he refused to be taken to the hospital, since that was where he had gotten sick in the first place. That was when my step-mother called me.
I asked him a simple question, “If you die, what happens to your retirement income and what happens to your wife?” Since he had married after retirement, the answer was that the income stopped, and his very ill wife would have no income and nobody to be with her all the time in case of another health crisis. “That’s cheating,” he said. “Alright, you win. I’ll go to a hospital, but not this local one.”
He lived another ten or fifteen years, dying last year just short of 85. You can call me a pest, too. I don’t mind it.
You never know, until recently we had a member in his 90’s. Not everyone advertises his age.
Remember, even when you’ve been dead for a million years, that’s only a tiny fraction of the amount of time you’re going to be dead.
Don’t remember where, but somewhere I heard that it’s the exception that proves the rule.
I could say something…but I won’t.
My father’s dear sweet cousin did not pass into the night until one week short of her 100th birthday. I hope I am so lucky, as her memory was still clear.
Thanks, Kent, and Happy Birthday!
Good job! :-)
I was going to say that you could take at least one pair of your underwear with you, but then I realized I don’t even know if funeral homes fit you out with undergarments.
I really must find that out. I don’t want the first time I go commando to be at my funeral.
Probably for the best.
Come on @cdor, admit it. You thought of this couplet too:
I hope to be under grass
before another camera goes up my a**
Good one, Marci. You used logic, and your father was wise enough to respond to it. You don’t sound pesty to me.
I am only 70 but find myself taking ironic pleasure in thinking about the many things that I don’t ever have to worry about again. I knew a fellow who always introduced his wife as his first wife. He thought it was funny but she eventually became his last wife after she left him.
@kentforrester Long ago and not so far away men like E.B.White and James Thurber considered the human condition and the problems inherent in writing clearly, the importance of the small things, the passing of time and the temporary nature of, well, everything. I’d feared it was a lost art.
Thank you for the wonderful post. One has to wonder if Dylan, while urging old age to “rage and rave at close of day”, was also compiling a list–the old man will never be woken by his cat again, or reread The Brothers Karamazov, or have to replace the bulb on the basement stairs.
A favorite bit was written by White for the New Yorker in April 1951, “Two Letters, Both Open”. I think it was collected in the volume “The Second Tree From the Corner”. Your piece brought it immediately to mind.
Well done!
Well thank you, Mark. I rarely come across someone who is so knowledgeable about the New Yorker and E. B. White. I myself haven’t kept up with the magazine in years. Is there still a print edition? Magazines like the New Yorker are dying off like flies.
I haven’t read The New Yorker in years myself. I think it’s still a thing, because I see the cartoons reproduced, but I’ll have to visit a doctor’s or dentist’s office for confirmation.
I’m 62, and have enjoyed reading and writing since I was a child, so White was an early influence. The Elements of Style, of course, but also his breezy way of writing about complicated things in very simple terms. The piece I mentioned, “Two Letters, Both Open” is a howl, because White writes a letter to the Collector of Internal Revenue at Bangor, Maine replying to a letter stating that if taxes owed on 1948 income are not paid the writer’s place in Maine will be seized and sold. He goes into great detail for tax collector regarding the things they will need to know if his place is seized–the nervous ducks, how the back door sticks and doesn’t latch unless you jiggle the handle just so, a stair tread that needs to be re-nailed, that sort of thing. It’s a peaceful, common sense style that appeals to me. You’ve got it.
“Dylan Thomas is a pest.” is the sort of concise, declarative sentence we don’t see much of these days. A perfect descriptive. The reader can fill in the blanks: “I’m dying here. Leave me alone.”
@samuelblock can probably tell you. His family is in the biz.
I should know. My daughter is a funeral director. But I don’t. I wouldn’t think they would outfit you in underwear just for the occasion.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m thinking. I’ll have to include it in my funeral instructions. Don’t know yet which way I’m going, but either way I think I’d be more comfortable meeting my fate with underwear on.
Something tasteful, of course. Not the time to go out on a limb.
I think boxers are the way to go.