Category Archives: verse and worse

This is beautiful, scolds the mind

This is beautiful, scolds the mind,
Seeing the mind wandering.
It ransacks its lexicon to find
Other words, pondering
Lovely, rare, or perhaps sublime
As sounds with which to hold the mind
That skitters anxiously through time
And which the things in view remind
Of other things undone, unfixed.
Disapproving, the mind regards
Itself distracted, not transfixed.
The whole it had glimpsed: now in shards.
The mind a problem for the mind,
A solid door has shut behind.

See also: When the Lotus Bloomed; Intimations; a Hegelian meditation; the fetter; and Mindlessness: A Sonnet

intimations

Small plants near the sea, I think, are naive.
They push their little roots down through the loam
As if they grew far from where the tides upheave.
They set out their ripening buds for bees
Never acknowledging gulls, fish, or foam--
As if they need not consider the fact
Of the water, impenetrably deep.
Their petals vibrate in the humid breeze
As if it's fine for a seedling to sleep
To the rattle of rocks and waves’ impact.
Why don't they hunch like a wind-blown tree?
Why don't they dread the presence of the sea?

Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness

Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.

Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.

I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.

As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.

“Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt wrote the poem “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”) in the winter of 1925-6, the season when she turned 20 and broke off a passionate relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger. It appears in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.

Hill’s translations are eloquent as well as learned. She aims for reliability and does not attempt to replicate Arendt’s sing-song rhythms and rhymes. I have given myself a little more license in translating “Klage” as follows:

Complaint

Oh, the days they pass by uselessly
Like a never settled game,
The hours pressing ruthlessly,
Each play of pain the same. 

Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away. 
And I sing the old songs’ first lines—
Not whatever else they say. 

And no child in a dream could move
In a more predetermined way. 
No old one could more surely prove
That a life is long and gray. 

But never will sorrow soothe away
Old dreams, nor the insight of youth. 
Never will it make me give away 
The bliss of lovely truth.

-- Hannah Arendt, 1925-6 (trans. Peter Levine)

This is a young person’s poem about a broken heart, concluding with an expression of indomitable spirit. The author was just a kid (and her teacher certainly shouldn’t have slept with her). The result could have been a cliché, a torch song, but Arendt’s tropes were original, and her craft was impeccable.

For instance, we read about a little girl dreaming that she is trudging along, and an old man knowing that life is gray, and then we encounter the phrase Alte Träume, junge Weisheit (old dreams and young wisdom). This is a surprising, chiastic twist.

Heidegger would soon give lectures that included an extended treatment of boredom. Perhaps he and Arendt had already discussed this topic before she wrote her poem (assuming that he didn’t get the idea from her verse). In short, for Heidegger, our experience of boredom discloses truths about time that are otherwise concealed. When we shift into or away from moods like boredom (or angst), we learn that what we imagine to be a self and a world are actually a single complex that unfolds in time (Levine 2023). Heidegger is all about acknowledging the vorgeschrieben Gang (predetermined way) of life but still claiming one’s own Glückes schöne Reinheit (beautiful purity of happiness). Even as Arendt felt depressed about breaking up with Heidegger, she explored and applied such ideas.

Later, the distinguished political theorist Hannah Arendt defended a distinction between the public and private spheres and guarded her private life, as she had every right to do. But her dignity should not mislead us that her private emotions were ever tame. Hill quotes a letter from Arendt to her husband: “And about the love of others who branded me as cold hearted, I always thought: If only you knew how dangerous love would be for me.” As someone who has read Arendt for nearly 40 years–but who only encountered her poetry recently (thanks to Hill)–I would say: I always knew this about her.


Source: P. Levine, “Boredom at the Border of Philosophy: Conceptual and Ethical Issues.” Frontiers in Sociology, July 2023 See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; on the moral dangers of cliché (partly about Arendt); Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School; Philip, Hannah, and Heinrich: a Play; don’t confuse bias and judgment; etc.

concerto of our climate

A supple line and steady chords,
A light, stately pace, a pulse.
The air itself vibrates with the
Bows on strings and the buzzing reed.
Oboe and counterpoint—one wants
So much more than that. Time itself
Simplified; measures and chords,
With nothing more than these pure notes.

Suppose that this old melody
Floated free of its author’s flaws,
Erased his bile, spite and fear,
Cleansed the players’ bitterness,
And turned our time into a tune.
Still, one would want more and need more
Than this oboe’s sinuous line.

There would remain the restless mind
So that one would want to return
To the music from bitter thoughts
From regrets and shames. That turn,
For us—with our minds so noisy—
Our delight lies only there.


(A direct response to Wallace Stevens’ “The Poems of our Climate,” using music and time instead of art and space. See also: Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man; Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; the fetter; and one supple line.)