These fine collapses are not lies —Chaplinesque, Hart Crane

Lines from the poem linked above pop into my head with some regularity. That’s probably because it’s one of the few I’ve memorized. Too, it’s a poem about finding wonder in every day life, which is essential if we’re to hold onto our hats in this rising wind.

I wonder what it was like for people in the last century who had so many great lines memorized that they could pull them out in conversation like candy from a pocket for a child on the street, without the creepy connotations, of course. I’ve reverse engineered a fair number of these party pieces for essays and such, and it’s proved to be a good way to enrich my thinking and, I hope, my writing.

For example, while watching the movie Darkest Hour with my husband and son after some holiday meal, I looked up the quote Churchill spouted in the tube. He was about to make a very important decision for the nation at the outset of World War II with only the counsel of other politicians. That being something of an echo chamber, he decided to brave the subway for the very first time to ask the British people what they thought. Everyone, including a child, shouted they would never want a treaty with Hitler,

“Out spake brave Horatius, captain of the gate (Thomas Macaulay, stanza 28),” he started to quote a famous passage which I didn’t know about until then. A young Jamaican immigrant of the Windrush generation, because the transition was not without its troubles, finished the quote with him. It always makes me cry.

In any case, I looked it up. This is nothing special. Anyone can do it. It’s loads of fun reading that poem out loud, though I only do it when my dogs are the only other people home. And, “plainly and more plainly,” they like it.

Another thing Gary Oldman, as Churchill, says is that the only causes worth fighting for are the lost ones. That’s a little how I feel, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Trying to find a hold on something essential, something true and possibly transcendent seems increasingly difficult as the world becomes “louder still and still more loud.”

I’m not quite sure what this blog will be. Odd thoughts, encouragements and, quite possibly, a recipe or two, because when you realize you’re enjoying some little thing you do every day, that’s pretty great, right?