From my perspective, Easter is not evidence or even a symbol as much as it is a clue that the significance of life may indeed lie in sustaining hope, a sense of purpose, and the willingness to love and be joyful, all without denying the inevitability of loss and death.
On that note, I offer a handful of pertinent quotes and fragments:
“On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined!” is my motto, whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfine
Mark Twain
Look, I really don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you’re quiet, you’re not living. You’ve got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.
Mel Brooks
Stagger onward rejoicing
From W.H. Auden’s Atlantis
Atlantis is, I think, the perfect Easter poem and well worth reading in its copyrighted entirety. Among other sites, Atlantis is available in full and at no charge ~PoemHunter.com - Atlantis~.
The last selection requires a preface: After my wife, Julie,1 died, folks sent me several books of the Grieving Is Good, But Get Over It Already genre. It seemed to me that the best of these did describe feelings that resonated with what I was experiencing and even though that empathy was diluted, incomplete, and limited, it was somewhat comforting. None of theses volumes, however, presented a compelling strategy for making sense of my loss and integrating it into my perception of life.
Then a friend re-introduced me to the poetry of Donald Hall, a well-known poet whose wife, Jane Kenyon (also a significant poet), had died several years previously. Much of his poetry focuses on her death and the consequences for him – consequences which long persisted. His grieving and subsequent depression didn’t resolve in a few months after his wife’s death, but gradually and unevenly lifted over a period of years. Hall’s experience here echoes my own so I am moved and uplifted by his eventual capacity for new beginnings, even happiness. This theme, Where I am now is not where I will be is one to which I have since clung.
The quotation consists of the final two lines from The Wedding Couple by Donald Hall. This poem is also under copyright and is more difficult than Auden’s to find on the web but is is available about halfway down the page in the archives of the Common Sensibilities blog and I recommend it wholeheartedly. To put these two lines in context, the poem describes a couple married 50 years. The husband has survived a heart attack and “trembled like a birch” but was still hardier than his wife who “dwindled by small strokes into a mannequin.” In this scene, he has carried her to the bathroom to wash her and then has returned her to to “CNN and bed.”
caressed him like a bride’s bold eyes.
Footnotes
- Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author, with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie Showalter FAQ.↩
2 responses so far ↓
1 Mrs. Linklater // Apr 17, 2006 at 7:43 am
So many ironic, rhetorical questions, so little time: Weren’t you Julie’s rock? Aren’t you more like Hercules than Sisyphus?
2 MindSpin // Apr 17, 2006 at 7:20 pm
I’m here listening still. There is good in these posts you are writing about Julie. They are not unlike the poems Hall had to put to paper. I’m holding out for hope, too, on your behalf - and even mine.