Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Hitchens draws some interesting parallels between T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

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Pound’s early life story is in some respects not unlike that of T. S. Eliot, the man who in his dedication to The Waste Land called Pound “il miglior fabbro” (which can mean either “the better writer” or “the better craftsman”). They shared the same desire to escape from provincial gentility in America to Europe and perhaps especially to England, the same struggle to convince parents and family that the effort was one worth endorsing and financing, the same quixotic belief that poetry could be made to yield a living and that poets were a special class, and the same register of annihilating shock when in the summer of 1914 the roof of the over-admired European civilization simply fell in.

-- Christopher Hitchens, “Ezra Pound: A Revolutionary Simpleton” in Arguably

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69. Pop

I call Pop out of his room for some fresh biscuits. He says, "Getting up early really takes it out of me." He went to a doctor's appointment this morning. I don't go through the old song and dance about how the problem may be that he goes to bed so late, at two or three in the morning. He is not going to change. But he does look like he takes a beating when he only gets a few hours sleep, and I worry that it gives old age a chance to take him down.

The Savage God

Of godlessness, death, and modern art.

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“What is it to me whether God exists,” wrote Miguel Unamuno, “unless I can live forever?”

But if God does not exist, then the very shape of death changes too. It ceases to be a human, or even superhuman, presence - macabre or godlike or seductive. It is neither the dancing skeleton of the Middle Ages nor the shrewd, powerful adversary with whom John Donne fought, nor the fatal lover of the Romantics. It ceases even to be an extension of the dying man’s personality: an entry into the afterlife, or a moment of revelation which, hopefully, will explain everything.

Without God, death simply becomes the end: brief, flat, final. The heart stops, the body decays .... This is “tomorrow’s zero,” which made Tolstoy, before his conversion, inveigh against “the meaningless absurdity of life.”

Camus saw this absurdity, this blank sense of there being nothing more to life than life itself, as the foundation on which all modern art rests.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

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70. Racing the Rain

I look out the window and see the trees being lashed about hard in the winds. It is shy of five o’clock in the late afternoon. I was planning on mowing at seven, but it is heavily overcast and relatively cool, and I am awake enough to appreciate that this would be a great opportunity to knock out that mow, if only I can hurry and beat the rain, if it does ever rain. It’s worth a gamble.

As soon as I step outside I can immediately feel the slightest precipitation on my skin, and if I were not so determined to get this chore done, I would have found grounds to reverse course and put off the work for another day, as I am usually happy to do. But I am geared up, and I figure that all I need is a good thirty minutes of fairly cooperative weather and I can do it.

And I am really moving out there. It’s like I am still in my twenties. The way I am ducking to pick things up from the ground and rushing back to the mower, and cutting to and fro across the yard, I am positively simian in my agility. The rain started to pick up its pace when I had only about a half-dozen rows to cut, and I just ran the mower up and down, before the grass got too wet. I did not even have time to empty the mower bag in the end, but I got the chore done.

This was actually a great experience for me, to feel so youthful, even athletic, but I am paying for it now, as my body registers its protest and threatens me with a dire warning if I persist in such foolishness.

Daily Fun

“Snake Attack!” by Justin Lo

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