The Gospel According to Time

The good news is also the bad news:

None of this matters very much.

In ten thousand years it’ll all be dust -

But forget the long view; just take tomorrow.

Tomorrow your today will seem a dream

And things will be far better, or far worse.

And Thursday! Don’t even dare imagine it.

Thursday will change everything, and if it doesn’t

Friday will certainly make up for lost time.

So none of it matters much – but it all matters.

Even the petty frustrations, even the seeming dead hours.

Though nothing at all depends upon a wheelbarrow,

The wheelbarrow still counts, in its trivial wheelbarrow way.

And you are also trivial,

And infinitely precious,

And when you think you’re doing nothing,

You hold the whole world in your hand.

Sunset, Santa Monica

When it happens, it happens fast.

All day the sun is slow and dignified,

Making a stately circuit in the sky,

Then all at once it drops; hits the horizon;

Spreads out like melting mercury; is gone.

The ceremony is unceremonious,

The climax anticlimactic;

The vanishing is vanishingly brief.

And that’s the way to go.

Don’t linger in your leaving;

Learn from the sun, which blazes like a god,

Fires the firmament, and slips away,

More like a guilty thief than anything,

Letting the living supply the ceremony –

Which we, atremble in the rising dark,

Are more than grateful to fearfully do.

The Ride

I wake up and I say:

Today, I will have an experience.

It will be good and bad, generally in succession,

But sometimes simultaneously,

Since men are complicated things.

Some of it I will be responsible for,

In ways I do or do not understand,

But other things will come to me at random,

And I will deal with them gracefully,

Or clumsily, depending on my mood.

My experience will overlap with other peoples’–

Because we all occupy the same world –

And sometimes, if I keep my eyes open,

I will glimpse what someone else is going through,

And he may likewise get a glimpse of me.

For the most part, though, it happens to me alone,

This fourteen-hour experience of things,

And most of it I’ll forget before my head hits the pillow,

But some of it may linger for the rest of my life.

In any case, it will be an experience,

And it will end in sleep, like so many before,

And tomorrow I’ll get up and have a different experience –

Though not completely different –

And so on, till no more.

It’s natural to have feelings about it –

In fact, that’s very much a part of the thing –

But silly to give it too much importance.

It washes over you; it’s gone; you’re gone.

The Prodigal

I come back to a place gone poetic,

A New England already battening down

For a long warm fireside winter

With frost on the windows and lights on the town.

I come back, and the autumn is over;

The leaves are in tatters and rags,

And they’re stacking up wood for the fires

And raking the fall into bags.

I come back to the place I belong in,

And it’s cold, but we like it that way,

And there’s nothing like home in the winter,

So I’m back, and God willing I’ll stay.

The One Kind of Fate I Believe In

We all find what we’re looking for;

It isn’t the same as what we want.

The coward seeks a reason to run;

He finds it.

The cynic seeks a reason to sneer;

He finds it.

The martyr needs a cause and a death;

He finds them.

The hero craves an enemy;

They’re everywhere.

To change what you’re finding,

Change what you’re looking for.

It’s all available

In the world’s wide aisles.

But if you look for meaning

In the Pleasure section,

Or wisdom in the back room

Where knowledge is dustily stored,

Don’t be too surprised

To walk out with what you searched for,

Instead of what you wrote this morning

On your hopeful grocery list.

Existential Crisis

 

Overheard at Bradley International Airport:

"I called my mom in a FULL meltdown because, like, what IS business casual?"

Tey Appreciation

You guys, it’s time to appreciate Josephine Tey.

Born Elizabeth MacKintosh, Tey wrote eight mystery novels, including The Daughter of Time, which is considered one of the genre’s great masterpieces.  I’ve now finished reading all eight of them, and here is my report.

The Man in the Queue is a slightly half-baked effort; it’s clear that Tey is still working out what she wants to do in the genre.  A Shilling for Candles is stronger, but still perhaps a little generic.  Miss Pym Disposes is the first one that really feels like a Josephine Tey novel – a novel that straddles the line between crime fiction and literary fiction, in which the characters’ inner lives – their joys and yearnings and frustrations – are accorded much more time and attention than genre impedimenta like suspects and clues.

The Franchise Affair is solid, but too procedural to be really fascinating.  And then comes Brat Farrar, my personal favorite, with all the scope, depth, and feeling of a genuine human tragedy.  If ever a book proved that there is no limit to the resonance of mystery fiction, this book is it.

To Love and Be Wise is deft and clever, but slightly inconsequential.  On the other hand, it’s obvious why The Daughter of Time is reckoned to be Tey’s masterwork; it’s bold and original and massively impressive, and it contributed to the reevaluation of Richard III as a historical figure.

Lastly, but not at all leastly, we have The Singing Sands, a starkly lovely and ruminative work that has the feel of an elegy – which is appropriate, since Tey didn’t live to see it published.  It’s a masterpiece of mood and restrained emotion, in which the mystery component, while present, is almost entirely an afterthought.  In a way, it’s a summation of Tey’s whole approach to crime writing, which is stubbornly humanistic in a field that can often – even in the hands of geniuses – treat its characters more like pieces on a chessboard than living, breathing people.

And that’s it.  That’s the whole canon.  Tey wrote other books, and a number of well-received plays, but her chief legacy is her mystery novels.  The British Crime Writers’ Association named The Daughter of Time as the greatest mystery novel ever written, and although it isn’t even my favorite Tey mystery, it’s hard not to see it as a worthy choice.

For those who are interested – you poor, sad, desperate souls – here’s my own personal ranking of the eight Tey mysteries.  The first four I would recommend without reservation, to anyone who enjoys a good read.  The next two are worthwhile, and the last two missable – though far from bad.  After you’ve read one or two, you may find yourself wanting to become a Tey completist, and I certainly wouldn’t discourage it.  It won’t even take you very long.

1.     Brat Farrar

2.     The Daughter of Time

3.     The Singing Sands

4.     Miss Pym Disposes

5.     To Love and Be Wise

6.     The Franchise Affair

7.     A Shilling for Candles

8.     The Man in the Queue

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Selleck Hill

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

The world is all the same – the people too.

We make safe homes, in clusters, cheek to cheek,

Resent our neighbors, and rely on them.

We love, grow bored, raise children, drive them off,

Welcome them back, love more, swift-slowly die;

Our children, then, have children; then

Their children do and die, and nothing’s new.

We scar the earth; it heals, or doesn’t heal;

We breed survivors, and the earth does too.

Wars happen, wisely or by accident,

And wise wars kill as many as the rest.

Great men, great women, rise and fall,

Remembered and forgotten, gone and gone.

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

Fall falls, and winter freezes; then the spring,

Grateful or hateful to the human heart,

Buds forth in raw magnificence, and soon

The summer sprawls out endless, ripe as joy.

You sit.  The leaves are color.  Light is light.

You sit in silence, waiting for the rhyme.

Time changes nothing, but it leaves you this:

This life, this moment, this brief gift of time.