Saw the movie “Away From Her” last night, and it’s stayed with me all day like a punch in the chest. It sometimes seems impossible to be joyous when you know it’s all going to end some day, that even the luckiest will age and have to say goodbye. Happiness in the face of this realization seems almost irrational. Yet to take a life, fleeting as it may be, and spend it being sad is at least equally irrational (and to no real purpose I can see.)
Maybe rationality is just something we impose upon the world (or at least our perception of it.) Like justice or beauty. In any case, between irrational happiness and sadness, the rational choice seems obvious. But people FEEL, and there’s the rub. Reminds me of great words by e.e. cummings, sent to me by a friend some time ago.
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
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