W.H. Auden:

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face

And the international wrong

[…]

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

A. E. Stallings:

My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast-guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.
I’m glad that we didn’t wake
Our kids in the thin hours, to take
Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And we didn’t hand over our cash
To one of the smuggling rackets,
That we didn’t buy cheap lifejackets
No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark
Above us, is not deeply twinned
Beneath us, and moiled with wind,
And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore
As the dinghy starts taking on water.
I’m glad that our six-year old daughter,
Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son
With his broken arm’s high and dry,
That the ceiling is not seeping sky,
With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous,
It’s selfish. It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us.

Ilya Kaminsky:

We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Kaminsky, in a recent interview:

That poem specifically has been shared widely on social media in the wake of Russia’s attack. How do you feel seeing your work resonate, particularly that poem, at this time?

“We Lived Happily During the War” is not a piece of journalism or philosophy, where one might go into facts or questions of ethics. In a poem, one hopes to create an experience in the reader: in this case, the hope of the poem is to help the reader see their own complicity.

The poem doesn’t want to be a pronouncement. The poem is a warning. This is what happens when half-measures take place. “We lived happily during the war,” the poem begins, and it ends with the same words. But by the time it gets to its final line, one hopes the reader might find the horrific irony in that fact of repetition. How many wars can we live through, happily?

One hopes the reader sees the critique of this “we” and what it has done. By the time you get to the repetition of “our country of money” and then to “our great country of money” — one questions the word “great.” That is what art hopes to do: it doesn’t shout at the reader “You must change!” Instead, the reader is changed via the act of reading.

What are you hearing from friends and family right now?

A writer from [Kyiv] tells me he sees people making Molotov cocktails together with their kids. An 80-year-old journalist from Odessa writes: “The air raid just quieted down. It’s a sunny morning.” My cousin tells me potatoes are marked up 50%. A James Joyce translator writes about spending the night sleeping next to a dog in the bomb shelter.

A friend from [Kyiv] emails with a photo of a bullet casing: “There’s a military outpost next to my house, just 1-minute walk. I found this on my balcony. A photo for you — a result of the war in my hand.”

Finally, this conversation I’ll never forget with an older friend from Odessa. After I asked him for any way I could help him, he responded: “Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are starting a new literary magazine.” In the first days of war. Imagine.

Joy Ike:

How could I be living this simple, peaceful existence of making art, prop-styling my apartment for mini photoshoots, listening to my podcasts, eating fresh produce from my garden? How could I justify waking up and creating in my comfort, when so much around me was dying?

Something was off. I was hoarding happiness and it didn’t feel . . . happy. I felt bloated, that kind of “Thanksgiving full” where you overeat and it’s just not fun anymore. There was a dissonance growing, and it was becoming bolder and bigger.

L.M. Sacasas (responding to an article about David Chalmers news book on the future of VR technology):

. . . I want to read Chalmers against the grain, which is to say as the unwitting emissary of a fantastical cautionary tale, which invites us not to fear some uncertain future but to reflect more critically on existing trends and patterns.

For example, I wonder for how many of us the experience of the world is already so attenuated or impoverished that we might be tempted to believe that a virtual simulation could prove richer and more enticing? And how many of us already live as if this were in fact the case? How much of my time do I already devote to digitally mediated images and experiences? How often am I lured away from the world before my eyes by the one present through the screen?

The claim that, even now, virtual realities can outstrip my experience of the world is increasingly plausible when I have lost the capacity to wonder at and delight in the gratuity and beauty of the world. And there may be many reasons why such capacities may have diminished, ranging from the ever-more complete enclosure of our experience within a frame of human artifice to the loss of the arts of perception and the power of social structures that eliminate the gift of leisure in principle and in practice for so many. In other words, I mean for us to consider how we might have already begun to sever our relation to our common world long before the virtual worlds Chalmers envisioned are, if ever, realized.

Robert Seigel:

Neti, Neti

Are you the ragged yellow fields?
      No, the grass, broken and happy.
Are you the air, damp and intimate?
      No, the deer’s flag, her hoof muffled in the swamp.
Are you the sun patiently peeling the clouds?
      No, the star in the dawn’s throat.
Are you the stones bearing me up on their safari?
      No, the acorn’s hat, where its thought grows sweet and whole.

      I am all these, and yet none:
Not the red streams flooding the banks of cells.
      nor the river hungry for the ocean
nor the crows feather that dandles to the ground
      nor the wind trafficking in perfume
nor the little pool holding a syllable of water.

Still, I am where the tongue presses the roof of the mouth,
      in the crease of the closed hand,
in the foot hesitating on the stoop,
      in the eye that draws its shape on the sky
      and lingers, waiting for the face of light.

Matthew Rose:

Tradition is the ritual abolition of time—this, in a sentence, was Guénon’s discovery and his revelation to the West. To a culture formed by Greek philosophy and biblical religion, he argued that no lasting society could be built on the contemplation of nature or the hope for a life beyond it. Time could be resisted only through tradition—only through the unceasing repetition of acts whose archetypes were thought to be as old as humanity itself. By imitating his ancestors, Guénon argued, the man of tradition was made contemporary with them and so transcended time. He lived in timeless solidarity with the generations that had preceded and would follow him. Neither nature nor history, therefore, could defeat him—for he had nothing of his own, did nothing by himself, and stood for nothing unique. He was merely a member of a sacred series. As Guénon’s greatest interpreter, Mircea Eliade, observed, the life of a traditional man had meaning only under one condition: that he was not an individual at all. What he did had always been done. What he believed had always been believed. His life was one of holy repetition.

As Guénon saw it, the postwar West was littered with mere fragments of knowledge. Modernity had succeeded in severing each branch of knowledge and every practical skill from the “sacred sciences” that once ordered them to wisdom. Guénon lamented that social roles, now dominated by technology, transmitted no spirituality and offered no portals to contemplation. Modern life instead imposed its own empty rituals, which were nothing but a “parody” of the sacred rhythms of traditional life—exacerbating our exposure to historical change, rather than protecting us from it. Guénon concluded that the West was indeed an exceptional civilization: It was exceptionally ­abnormal in seeking “the destruction of all ­traditional institutions.”

At the time of his death in 1951, Guénon had largely given up hope that the dissolution of traditional societies could be stopped. He encouraged his followers to hold inwardly to the eternal doctrines that he, in a conspicuous break with tradition, had committed to writing.

[…]

We need not agree with Guénon in order to recognize that he was right about the dismantling of tradition in liberal societies. He understood the civilizational calamity, to say nothing of the human cruelty, of making each generation a stranger to those that precede and follow it. Who we will be, what we will believe, where we will live, how and when we will die—we are now burdened with building our lives from scratch, precisely at the moment when we most need the wisdom of tradition. Guénon was rightly horrified by the nihilism of a culture whose past is stolen through enforced forgetting. And though he was not a believer in any traditional sense, he sought the same consolation many religious people do: refuge in a realm of imperishable truth.

But in imagining a primordial tradition, existing beyond the flow of time, Guénon, paradoxically, drained human life of its meaning. Guénon ignored the personal and embodied dimensions of human experience. No individuals mattered when seen from the horizon of deep time, and no great men or women could shape our common destiny. Guénon’s vision of eternity prevented him from seeing any real human beings, whose unfolding lives form the drama of history. His “tradition,” hidden in secret symbols and encoded rituals, was disembodied from the ways in which any inheritance is transmitted. Guénon showed almost no interest in Western art, literature, or folkways, and his failure was no accident. For he could not acknowledge the animating core of our culture, with its basis in the Bible, whose message he could not bear to confront. Scripture sees time as fraught with meaning. It imagines that eternity is glimpsed in the small dramas of ordinary lives whose every moment is charged with meaning.

Guénon’s return to tradition was no return at all. It was an escape—from the finitude of creaturely life into the imagined citadel of tradition. His error was fundamental and prevented him from being the steward of any tradition that might be renewed. He did not understand that our involvement in history, including our vulnerability to it, is what allows us to seek what is truly human and what is infinitely beyond history. With his vision turned to the mystery of human prehistory, Guénon failed to appreciate the mystery before him. It is the mystery that the deepest ­human potentialities become full, rich, and perfected only through the adventure of history, where they are tested, illumined, and enhanced. Human beings must live in time, and it is only within a world of change that we can give shape to our souls. Our responsibility to do so gives our lives a perpetual restlessness and discontent. Guénon experienced as a crisis and a loss what is, in truth, a task and calling. And when we see time not as the place of our dispossession, but as our journey toward home, then a more exalted vision of human life opens before us.

I had to make two attempts, one several months ago, but I read Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual this week. I can’t say why, but the fist time around I just couldn’t grab on to any of the characters. Even the second time took a little effort and a hundred or so pages. And that lag getting into the book came as a surprise, since the opening chapter is such a completely gripping start.

I don’t think it would be a spoiler to say that every character dies in the first chapter (it says as much on the inside jacket) when a German V-2 rocket explodes at a Woolworth’s in London in 1944. What follows and what makes up the rest of the book is a series of snapshots from the lives that would have gone on had a bomb not gone off when and where it did.

Shoppers, saucepans, ballistic missiles: what’s wrong with this picture? No one is going to tell us. Jo and Alec, as it happens are looking in the right direction. Their gaze is fixed on the gap between the shoulders of Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Canaghan where the rocket is gliding into view. But they can’t see it. Nobody can. The image of the V-2 is on their retinas, but it takes far longer than a ten-thousandth of a second for the human eye to process an image and send it to a brain. Much sooner than that, the children won’t have eyes any more. Or brains. This instant—this interval of time, measurably tiny, immeasurably vast—arrives unwitnessed, passes unwitnessed, ends unwitnessed. And yet it is a real moment. It really happens. It really takes its necessary place in the sequence of moments by which 910 kilos of amatol are delivered among the saucepans.

In one sense, the opening chapter is meaningless to the story and the characters whose lives play out on the pages that follow, since at no point do we revisit what really happened. In another sense, however, much like with the whole of any story, or poem, when you close this book at the end, you can’t help thinking simultaneously about the beginning, about how the stories of these characters have never actually taken place, the lives of each as a child violently cut short. This makes what is otherwise a fairly simple novel into something much more moving—and haunting.

I’m reminded a little of how I felt—or in the inverse of how I felt—at the end of Adam Makos’s A Higher Call. Makos tells the true story that revolves around two pilots, one American B-17 pilot named Charlie Brown, and one German Bf-109 pilot named Franz Stigler. Because Stigler chose not to shoot down a nearly crippled B-17 after a bombing of Bremen, Brown and his crew live to see the future and the families they would never have known because that future and their families would not have existed.

Makos describes the scene at a filmed meeting between Charlie Brown and his crew and Franz Stigler in Massachusetts in 1990:

From above it must have looked funny, the circle of people crowding around one small man in the center, hugging him and one another amid the sounds of tears and laughter. But everyone that day owed something to Franz Stigler, the man in the middle. Because of him, twenty-five men, women, and children—the descendants of Charlie, Blackie, and Pechout—had the chance to live, not to mention the children and grandchildren of Charlie’s other crewmen. . . .

From above, the circle of people blended as they hugged near the [B-17] bomber’s wing, becoming just one mass, bigger and greater as the gaps between them vanished.

That, of course, was a true story all the way through, while Spufford’s story is only based on a true event. (There really was a Woolworth’s in London destroyed by a V-2 rocket in 1944.) But the effect of each story is nearly the same. Somehow, deep down, the thankfulness of the one story is nearly interchangeable with the lament of the other. The fact is, I can imagine, for individuals and for the world, a moment like this—a circle viewed from above as people hug and blend, give thanks and reconcile—for all the lives that went wrong as much as for the ones that went right.

One of the things I like most about Light Perpetual is how Spufford so humanizes each character. This is not a sob story about simply wonderful lives that never got their chance. Though it might be a little overdone at times, each of his characters has as much trouble and tragedy as anything, but each still has some chance for meaning, joy, redemption. Each life is set on some trajectory in a way that we all know as both intimately chosen and yet vastly uncontrollable.

As one character, Jo, is observing a group of young students later in the book, she wonders about the glories and the harms that await them:

But you can’t warn them, any more than you can tell them in terms that would make sense to them that their transformation is glorious. Youth isn’t visible to them, any more than air is. It’s the condition of their lives, but it isn’t a thing that they could imagine not having, and therefore could imagine as being desirable in itself.

In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes puts this eclipsed, front-loaded sense of childhood quite powerfully:

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

And yet, out of such unknowable, uncontrollable, chaotic sludge come all the tainted goodness and glory and light worthy of the name “life.”

Jo again, reflecting on that same group of students as they sing together:

Can they hear it, this immense organised sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don’t stop till you must. Notice if you can that your temporary orchestra of hormones and still-digesting Big Macs from lunchtime can be coaxed into playing the music of the spheres. If you let yourself be the instrument.

Then the bell goes, and they clatter away laughing.

I think what I would like to see is a book like this, with almost the exact same introductory chapter, but written for characters in the Middle East—say, a family in Afghanistan, killed by a U.S. drone strike. Zamir, Faisal, Farzad, Arwin, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, Sumaia—what lives might they have lived, “those particles, flecks, shreds, lumps and pieces that, previously, were parts of people; people being missed, waited for, despaired of . . .”? Isn’t this worth wondering, too?

But what has gone is not just the children’s present existence . . . It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?

Which is to say, how can that loss be measured except by the standard of its own existence in time? How can the loss of life be known except by remembering it and lamenting its loss? In the words of Barbara Kingsolver, when she visited Ground Zero in Hiroshima:

I was moved beyond words, even beyond tears, to think of all that can be lost or gained in the gulf between any act of will and its consequences. In the course of every failure of understanding, we have so much to learn.

There is more than enough in any given day’s newsreel, public or private, to provoke this kind of lament, to plead a deep humility, and to warrant a corresponding hope.

It seems right to end where Spufford begins:

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.

Come dust.