Despite All

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“The quarrels of popes and kings, 

with wars and pestilences in every page; 

the men all so good for nothing and 

hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.” 

—Jane Austen

Sometimes the choices we make around relationships and work seem to have no choice in them at all. Each of us grapples with forces far larger than our goals or ourselves: each of us wrestles with our family inheritance, our educational possibilities, the lucky or unlucky DNA that ordains our health and, especially, the fateful time in history into which we were born.

There are other powers we like to forget. 

Nature can be a deadly arbiter of our future, independent of our human need to plan. Nature’s winds can drive us out of a city, destroy our schools and undermine a health system for years to come. A tsunami can devastate a thousand miles of coastline, and constant rain may inundate half a nation. 

As human beings, we have a necessary conceit about our own ability to influence events. 

The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality. 

The United States, that supposed bedrock home of upward mobility, is actually one of the developed industrial nations where people are most likely to live and die in the class to which they were born. We are creatures who like to believe our own publicity, and we do not like to face powers that can easily surpass and encompass our best hopes. We hope always for a free pass to circumvent forces that humble us on a daily basis.

Although we can never escape these overarching powers and difficulties, it can be instructive to look to those who have made sense of their life or their work in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, circumstances where we would have every reason either not to try or to look the other way and pretend they did not exist.

Shakespeare’s sonnet 64 is unstintingly courageous in this regard: it demonstrates the kind of courage needed to look the leveled World Trade Center towers in the eye, to survey a devastated New Orleans or to say goodbye for the last time in the face of a loved one’s death.

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state it self confounded to decay,

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death which cannot choose

But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

Shakespeare

David Whyte