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For anyone, stepping away from actions where one knows one’s measure is good. It shakes away an excess of seriousness.
It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.
Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.”* It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished.
In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
But my point is not simply that Hopkins found it difficult; rather, that in such a severe “program” of religious life there was every indication that nearness to God could be brought about by increasingly rigorous behavior, more prayer, more work, more abstinence. It was Loyola’s way, and Hopkins chose it, and it wore him to the bone. That such behavior, born in humility, finally becomes a kind of self-exploitation rather than self-mastery, and therefore is no longer humility at all, of course complicates the issue.
Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader.
Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us.
Sometimes I think, were I just a little rougher made, I would go altogether to the woods—to my work entirely, and solitude, a few friends, books, my dogs, all things peaceful, ready for meditation and industry—if for no other reason than to escape the heart-jamming damages and discouragements of the worlds mean spirits. But, no use. Even the most solitudinous of us is communal by habit, and indeed by commitment to the bravest of our dreams, which is to make a moral world. The whirlwind of human behavior is not to be set aside.
A voice very faint, and inside me, offers a possibility: how shall there be redemption and resurrection unless there has been a great sorrow? And isn’t struggle and rising the real work of our lives?
Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet.
Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?
