Read this today in my Lapham’s Quarterly on Time and was spellbound. There is something in writing, in poetry that touches upon life in a way I cannot put my finger on. It is as though everyday life is an illusion, a dull reflection of a true and glorious reality. When I read a passage like this and beautiful poetry it touches on that truth for a very brief instant, like suddenly being struck with a flicker of a vivid and intense dream from the night before that was not remembered after waking.
A passage by D.H. Lawrence, from the preface to New Poems.
When the Greeks heard The Iliad and The Odyssey, they heard their own past calling in their hearts, as men far inland sometimes hear the sea and fall weak with powerful, wonderful regret, nostalgia; or else their own future rippled its time beats through their blood, as they followed the painful, glamorous progress of the Ithacan……
Life, the ever present, knows no finality, no finished crystallization. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness.
