Religious festivals
are almost always
very bad news
for many animals
Tag: History
No room in the neurones
He who is
tired of learning
has been doing
it for seventy
three years and
needs to rest
Crossing the stream
When I first read “From here to Eternity” I was devastated, wanted to read it again and discover that the ending had magically changed and that Prewitt lived. It just needed me to wish hard enough. A number of other books the same. But sadly, as I knew, really, the book is unchanging, fixed. But gradually I came to realise I was wrong – the novel is flexible, changeable.
You can never read the same book twice. You age, experience, change, gain wisdom, experience disappointment, loss, triumph, achievement, so that, though it is the same book you pick up again, much later, your reading of it will be quite changed. And its context will be changed, the world around it has moved on, and we read it in the context of that world, read Dickens, for example, partly as historical documents, while to his contemporaries he was up-to-the-moment modern, reflecting the world he shared with those readers. Finally, even if we avoid those traps by finishing the last page and immediately turning back to page one to start reading again, we can’t avoid the problem that this time we are reading with the knowledge of the plot, with the knowledge of how it ends, and so cannot avoid reading in a different way.
This characteristic of books is also true of other creative works – music, artworks, drama – although the complexity and extent of a novel means that the experiences are unique, like a fingerprint, whereas one’s reaction to, say, a painting may not vary all that much.
Best time to plant a tree
In later life
you are gardening
not for yourself
but for your
successors.
Homeward bound
Just as well the house
I lived in as a child has
been demolished,
bulldozed, removed from
the surface of the planet
and replaced by two new
houses with no history.
Not that I would want
it still standing but
extensively remodeled
and modernised. No
point in that other than
it representing the spot
on the planet where
I was formed and grew.
What I want, I suppose,
is to magically return
to the functioning 1950s
house, even the 1960s.
Furniture still in place,
pictures on walls, carpets
on floors, ornaments on
shelves, books in bookcases.
And people, people in chairs,
in kitchens, watching tv,
in the garden, welcoming
the New Year, talking of
the past. A house, a home,
reconstructed, revisited,
a place I once couldn’t
wait to escape for new
adventures, new sights
and sounds, new people.
But the past is another
country, and you can’t go back.
He who
To have the last laugh
you need to be the last one
left standing. But who has the
energy for laughing then?
Values
Once upon a time
the products of high
technology – pottery,
swords, carriages,
furniture, bicycles,
wireless sets – were
valued and
treasured; kept in
good repair for
many years, decades,
passed on
from generation to
generation. Now mobile
phones, ipads, tv sets, video
games, cars, houses
even, end up in landfill
after months, days,
hours sometimes.
Fly away
All of that effort
to raise a young Magpie –
sitting on eggs for weeks,
backwards and forwards
bringing beakfuls of
juicy worms and beetles,
ends as a sad bunch of
feathers smeared across
a busy road.
Much like children
in a war zone.
Those were the days my friend
Old age comes,
finally, like the
turning on of a
spotlight, when there
is no one left alive
who knew you
as a child.
Shredded
When you look back
on your long life
it is as if every detail,
every moment, was
written on a great scroll,
and then put
through a shredder, so
that you are reduced to
picking up thin strips
of paper, each with a
phrase, a headline,
an image, unconnected
to anything else.
Good luck putting
the pieces together.
