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Thursday, August 16, 2007

Mr. Ingarao
Part Two

From "Aes Triplex" --


And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. [Strong transitional phrase -- And yet, -- into this next, very long paragraph.] This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib. [A penny squib is a cheap firecracker. Notice how this long cosmic sentence ends with a fine deflationary thud.] And what, pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards? [Pathologically here meaning scientifically. And a petard is also a firecracker. The body as a bagful of petards. Fun.] The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship’s powder-magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. [A powder-magazine is a storage room for ammunition and weapons. Note the impressive extension of the explosion image.] If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are [Here he elaborates on his earlier criticism of philosophers; they think we actively fear death and grasp pathetically at life.], for the subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would follow them into battle — the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship? [The blue-peter's a flag flown when a ship is ready to sail.] Think (if these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: ["the daily peril of the dinner-table" -- amusing, poetic...] a deadlier spot than any battle-field in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left their bones! [Yes. I recently mentioned here Joan Didion's book about her husband's death - The Year of Magical Thinking - and that's just how he died -- sitting down to dinner.] What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle, and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man’s age compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. [Well-observed, funny, though a bit of too much in terms of length. You can't have everything. ... Larkin has a bit in a poem on this subject too. From The Old Fools: For the rooms grow farther, leaving / Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear / Of taken breath, and them crouching below / Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving / How near it is. 'Extinction's alp' - very same business you see in Stevenson.] It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.

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