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The Way Things Are

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English Poet, Writer, and Novelist Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

Usually, during the month of January, I concentrate on reading the work of authors that I have not read before. Due to illness and wildfires, my reading this month has been mostly nil. As a result of reading an article in the New York Review of Books, however, I have decided on my next new “discovery,” Walter de la Mare. The following quote comes from his Memoirs of a Midget (1921).

Not that in an existence so passive riddles never came my way. As one morning I brushed past a bush of lads’ love (or maidens’ ruin, as some call it), its fragrance sweeping me from top to toe, I stumbled on the carcass of a young mole. Curiosity vanquished the first gulp of horror. Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in the dust and surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar and absorbed recognition. “Ah, ha!” a voice cried within me, “so this is what is in wait; this is how things are”; and I stooped with lips drawn back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely. That was a lesson I have never unlearned.

“A Butterfly Secret”

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Bats Head in Dorset

I have just finished reading the essays in Earth Memories by Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939), one of three literary giants in a family that included John Cowper Powys (1872-1063) and T. F. Powys (1875-1953). The essays in the book are mostly nature studies with an occasional jaunt into the philosophical implications of his everyday reality. The following is from his essay “A Butterfly Secret”:

And, indeed, as one walks over these downs at nighttime, under the fathomless pricked dome of infinity, one receives but one answer, The matter is as plain as a child’s sum in a dame’s school. Life is its own justification. There is no other aim to it, no other meaning, no other purpose, and if we think otherwise, we are foolish. Let the truth be spoken. Each one of us, each intellectual soul among us, advances steadily and surely toward the grave. Abdel Krim and his Rifis, General Feng and his soldiers, are all marching down the same road—a road that leads to oblivion and that for a thousand years has been trodden by a procession of all nations. Every religion is as brittle as an empty snail shell in dry weather, as quick to disappear as cuckoo-spit in a summer hedge that conceals at its center no green fly. The secret to be remembered is that nothing matters, nothing but the momentary consciousness of each individual as he opens his eyes upon a spectacle that knows nought of ethics.

Let us, as best we may, reconcile our minds to the fact that all our self-imposed tasks, our political engineering, our brave talk have actually, under the shadow of Eternity, no consequence. Our idealism is treacherous. It is a moonshine path over a deep sea. We are cursed souls each one of us and resemble nothing so much as jackdaws flying about he radiant cliffs of God pretending to be seagulls.

And yet there is no cause to despair. Merely to have come to consciousness at all constitutes an inestimable privilege. The past is nothing, the future is nothing, the eternal now alone is of moment. This is understood well enough by every living creature but man.

“A Toad Can Die of Light”

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I can never tire of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Short though they may be, they resonate far beyond their few lines. I love the last two lines about “the gnat’s supremacy.”

A toad can die of light!
Death is the common right
Of toads and men,--
Of earl and midge
The privilege.
Why swagger then?
The gnat's supremacy
Is large as thine.