You realize that the value of life is dying, that the value of affection is loss, and nonetheless you watch the golden afternoon mild fall on a face you like, realizing that the sunshine will quickly fade, realizing that the loving face too will sooner or later fade to indifference or bone, and you like anyway — as a result of life is transient however potential, as a result of love alone bridges the unattainable and the everlasting.
I take into consideration this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits throughout the sky of my thoughts:
Life will break you. No person can defend you from that, and residing alone received’t both, for solitude may even break you with its craving. It’s important to love. It’s important to really feel. It’s the motive you’re right here on earth. You’re right here to threat your coronary heart. You’re right here to be swallowed up. And when it occurs that you’re damaged, or betrayed, or left, or damage, or dying brushes close to, let your self sit by an apple tree and take heed to the apples falling throughout you in heaps, losing their sweetness. Inform your self that you simply tasted as many as you possibly can.
This, in fact, is what life developed to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the chilly darkish silence of an detached cosmos that will sooner or later swallow all of it. Each residing factor is its singer and its steward — one thing the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with unusual poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” present in his altogether magnificent posthumous assortment The Star Thrower (public library).
Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking via fern and pine needles accumulating fossils, dozing off within the heat daylight, then being abruptly woke up by an excellent commotion to see “an unlimited raven with a crimson and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked department above. He writes:
Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny dad and mom. Nobody dared to assault the raven. However they cried there in some instinctive frequent distress, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade crammed with their gentle rustling and their cries. They fluttered as if to level their wings on the assassin. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a chook of dying. And he, the assassin, the black chook on the coronary heart of life, sat on there, glistening within the frequent mild, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I noticed the judgment. It was the judgment of life in opposition to dying. I’ll by no means see it once more so forcefully introduced. I’ll by no means hear it once more in notes so tragically extended. For within the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal word of a music sparrow lifted hesitantly within the hush. And at last, after painful fluttering, one other took the music, after which one other, the music passing from one chook to a different, doubtfully at first, as if some evil factor had been being slowly forgotten. Until abruptly they took coronary heart and sang from many throats joyously collectively as birds are recognized to sing. They sang as a result of life is nice and daylight lovely. They sang beneath the brooding shadow of the raven. In easy reality that they had forgotten the raven, for they had been the singers of life, and never of dying.
Couple with Hannah Arendt on love and the best way to reside with the basic worry of loss, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the warblers and the marvel of being.
