I know I'm late here, and I could quote the whole thing, but here's a bit from Auden's "Out on the lawn I lie in bed":
Soon, soon, through dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.
But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears,
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears,
May these delights we dread to lose,
This privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong,
As through a child"s rash happy cries
The drowned parental voices rise
In unlamenting song.
After discharges of alarm
All unpredicted let them calm
The pulse of nervous nations,
Forgive the murderer in his glass,
Tough in their patience to surpass
The tigress her swift motion.
On GWB's response, I could also suggest "Musee des Beaux Arts":
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The full interview-by-mail from which that Tiptree quotation comes is in Meet Me at Infinity, a terrific posthumous collection of her nonfiction and uncollected fiction. A further sample:
I once worked briefly on a paper, the good old crazy Chicago Sun, where a bloat-eyed scotch-ridden frog from Texas called a feature editor kept a big pair of shears by his bottle. When you handed him your hot and beating prose he eyed it in silence with the reds of his eyes shining over the bags and then took up the shears and cut off the last third, which was where the point was. A learning experience.
I was happy to be Toby, though was kind of disappointed there were no options for Lord John Marbury.
I have no idea where John le Carre9 is politically, but he certainly seems to be getting more radical as he gets older. A couple of his post-Cold War novels, The Night Manager and The Constant Gardener, are concerned with institutional corruption and, respectively, the arms trade and drugs companies' activities in Africa. He's not published any fiction post-September 11th (though there was that rather strident anti-US piece in The Times a year or so ago), but there's a new novel, Absolute Friends, coming next January.
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