that the worth of life is loss of life, that the worth of affection is loss, and nonetheless you watch the golden afternoon mild fall on a face you like, understanding that the sunshine will quickly fade, understanding that the loving face too will someday fade to indifference or bone, and you like anyway — as a result of life is transient however doable, as a result of love alone bridges the unimaginable and the everlasting.
I take into consideration this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits throughout the sky of my thoughts:
Life will break you. No one can shield you from that, and dwelling alone received’t both, for solitude can even break you with its craving. You need to love. You need to really feel. It’s the motive you’re right here on earth. You might be right here to threat your coronary heart. You might be right here to be swallowed up. And when it occurs that you’re damaged, or betrayed, or left, or harm, or loss of life brushes close to, let your self sit by an apple tree and take heed to the apples falling throughout you in heaps, losing their sweetness. Inform your self that you just tasted as many as you could possibly.
This, in fact, is what life developed to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the chilly darkish silence of an detached cosmos that will one day swallow all of it. Each dwelling factor is its singer and its steward — one thing the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with unusual poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” present in his altogether magnificent posthumous assortment The Star Thrower (public library).
Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking via fern and pine needles amassing fossils, dozing off within the heat daylight, then being all of the sudden woke up by an incredible commotion to see “an unlimited raven with a purple and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked department above. He writes:
Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny dad and mom. Nobody dared to assault the raven. However they cried there in some instinctive widespread distress, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade crammed with their delicate rustling and their cries. They fluttered as if to level their wings on the assassin. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a chook of loss of life. And he, the assassin, the black chook on the coronary heart of life, sat on there, glistening within the widespread mild, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I noticed the judgment. It was the judgment of life towards loss of life. I’ll by no means see it once more so forcefully introduced. I’ll by no means hear it once more in notes so tragically extended. For within the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal notice of a track sparrow lifted hesitantly within the hush. And eventually, after painful fluttering, one other took the track, after which one other, the track passing from one chook to a different, doubtfully at first, as if some evil factor have been being slowly forgotten. Until all of the sudden they took coronary heart and sang from many throats joyously collectively as birds are recognized to sing. They sang as a result of life is good and daylight stunning. They sang below the brooding shadow of the raven. In easy reality they’d forgotten the raven, for they have been the singers of life, and never of loss of life.
Couple with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the warblers and the wonder of being.
