Accidents of birth
William Meredith
--
"I see the terrifying spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find
myself attached to a corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I
am more in this place than in another, nor why this little time that is
given me to live is assigned me at this point more than another out of
all the eternity that has preceded me and out of all that will follow me."
(Thoughts on Religion, Pascal).
"The approach of a man's life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?"
(The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry)
--
Spared by a car- or airplane-crash or
cured of malignancy, people look
around with new eyes at a newly
praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.
For I've been brought back again from the
fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie
down for long naps. And I've also been
pardoned miraculously for years
by the lava of chance which runs down
the world's gullies, silting us back.
Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet
happened away.
But it's not this random
life only, throwing its sensual
astonishments upside down on
the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,
not just me being here again, old
needer, looking for someone to need,
but you, up from the clay yourself,
as luck would have it, and inching
over the same little segment of earth-
ball, in the same little eon, to
meet in a room, alive in our skins,
and the whole galaxy gaping there
and the centuries whining like gnats --
you, to teach me to see it, to see
it with you, and to offer somebody
uncomprehending, impudent thanks.