I thought recently of this poem, by Thomas Hardy, when I came to the passage, near the end of Philip Roth's Everyman, in which the septuagenarian narrator is rebuffed by a fit young female jogger along the Jersey Shore. It could serve as an epigraph for the book, and is also an antidote to the happy chimera about the serene elderly enjoying the respect that their wisdom elicits from the young. As Schopenhauer noted, we are like children disporting ourselves before the stage's drawn curtain. We do not know what will happen to us, which is fortunate.
Here is another poem by Hardy on a similar theme. My wife sometimes gets annoyed with me for failing to rise to her level of giddiness when something good happens. Too much internalized Thomas Hardy.
One more note on poetry: While sorting out some old New York Reviews to recycle, I stumbled across, and reread, an essay by Charles Simic on Elizabeth Bishop. Simic seems to have something in about one out of every three issues of the Review and he is one of my favorites. The occasion for the Bishop essay was the publication of a book of poems she never published while alive. The book is controversial: Helen Vendler, for one, thinks that if Bishop didn't regard the poems as finished, and did not seek to have them published, then they should not be published. But I am thankful for the book, if for no other reason than I get to find out what Simic thinks on yet another subject. In the essay he quotes at length from a poem Bishop wrote when 16 years old. Here is my favorite passage.
And so besides my diamond rings
I carry with me but two things:
A blue balloon to lift my eyes
Above all pettiness and lies,
A neat and compact potted plant
To hide from a pursuing aunt.
Bishop was a close observer of the natural world, and an avid reader of the works of Charles Darwin, whom she praised for "the beautiful solid case [he] built up out of his endless, heroic observations. . . his eyes fixed on facts and minute details."
Speaking of Darwin and poets, here is a poem I found by following a link at the blog Pharyngula.
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