A Poet's Journal: October 23rd, 2014

 

October 23rd, 2014

It is tempting to believe that in the lives of the past there was never a dull moment.  Take the life of any dead poet and his years seem as minutes, and every great word or sentence that was conceived by him is as if molded into every second of his life.  There is such an ideal that goes along with it, it is hard to believe they ever took the time to cook for themselves, or do housework, or were prey to the mundane emotions of life.  Boredom, I doubt, has evolved over the centuries, but why do we not see it in them?  What makes us believe that we are so lowly we have not yet reached a state of awareness, the kind of which appeared open to the poets of the past?  It is easy to suffer, but harder to turn that suffering into something no one will ever bat an eye at.  Perhaps what we believe of the past is only our unrealized suffering coming into view.  But perhaps it all comes from our trying too hard, of our making the most of each moment; for it is all too much of an accomplishment, too much of a struggle, and all of it eventually ends in boredom.  The bulk of one's life is uneventful, whether the mind confronts this as delusion or not, but there is some truth to this: we should consider ourselves fortunate to live in the shade of what is always unrecorded.

Douglas Thornton