Anthologist, The by Baker Nicholson

Author:Baker, Nicholson [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Modern Classics, Humour, Novel
ISBN: 9781416572442
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

GREAT VALUE

GRANDE VALEUR

Six batteries left. And it turns out I've been carrying around a New York subway map and didn't know it.

And that's just one side pouch. So, anything about death in there? No! Well, yes. The Dryden couplet in the notebook is about death. It's in what experts call iambic pentameter:

All human things are subject to decay

And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis.

On the other hand, maybe my briefcase is wrong. Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes. And we need poems to declare love, too. Which they do, over and over. I love you, or I love her, or I love him--love is behind a huge mass of poems--and that's good. Because actually those are two truths that we should keep on thinking about for ourselves. I love you, and all the people I know and depend on are going to reach the end of their lives and when they go it's completely unexpected even when part of you knew it was in the offing.

YOU CAN TAKE IT a step further and say, as Herrick did, "Gather ye rosebuds." Go ahead, say it if you must. But know it's a typo. It was supposed to be "Gather your rosebuds"-- the "ye" was an abbreviation for "your" but with an "e" in place of the "r." It was corrected to "your" in the second edition. So, yes, you can say enjoy the panoply now, friends, gather your rosebuds, make the best bouquet of them you can manage, use all the sprigs of baby's breath you care to use, because time is on the march and you must, of course, "seize the day."

But here's the thing. Horace didn't say that. "Carpe diem" doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. "Carpe diem" means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.