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Auden
Archaeology
The archaeologist's spade
delves into dwellings
vacancied long ago,
... Continue Reading
Volkov, trong khi trò chuyện với nhà thơ Brodsky, đã nhắc
tới một tiểu luận về Stravinsky, của Auden, qua đó, nhà thơ Anh này cho
rằng, chính cái gọi là sự tiến hóa [evolution], phân biệt nghệ sĩ lớn với
thứ nhỏ con. Nhìn hai bài thơ của ông nhỏ con, không làm sao biết bài nào
làm trước.
Theo nghĩa đó, một khi đạt được một tí thành tựu nào đó, nhà thơ bé bèn
ngưng lại, không chịu lớn thêm nữa. Anh ta hết chuyện nói [He has no more
history]. Trong khi, nghệ sĩ lớn, chẳng bao g...
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Note: Cũng sách xon. Cùng tay biên tập Tuyển Tập Thơ, Edward
Mendelson. Gấu thực sự choáng khi biết Auden còn là 1 tay điểm sách, tác
giả, phê bình. Đọc loáng thoáng, trong bài viết về Pope: Bài thơ bảnh
nhất, độc nhất, đối với tôi, của Pope, thất bại, là bài An Essay on Man.
Nhưng thất bại, đấy, vưỡn có những dòng thần sầu…
Thế rồi Auden nói vào tai Gấu, câu thơ thần sầu của Pope:
Die of a rose in aromatic pain: Chết của 1 bông hồng, trong cơn đau
thơm lừng.
Bài về C.P. Cavafy, 1 “gay”,
như ông, cũng thật tuyệt:
C. P. CAVAFY
Ever since I was first introduced to his poetry by the
late Professor R. M. Dawkins over thirty years ago, C. P. Cavafy has remained
an influence on my own writing; that is to say, I can think of poems which,
if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently
or perhaps not written at all.
30 năm trôi qua, kể từ khi được biết tới ông, qua giáo
sư đã mất R.M. Dawkins, Cavafy ảnh hưởng lên cái viết của riêng tôi, điều
này có nghĩa:
Tôi nghĩ đến những bài thơ mà giả dụ rằng, tôi không biết Cavafy
là ai, thì tôi sẽ viết 1 cách khác hẳn, hay có lẽ, đếch viết ra!
Ui chao, thần sầu. Mít cứt đái, đếch thằng nào có Thầy, làm
sao viết nổi 1 dòng đơn giản như thế! NQT
Re: Auden sửa thơ.
Trong bài Giới thiệu Tuyển Tập Thơ của Auden, tay biên tập
khuyên chúng ta:
Probably the best way to get to know Auden's work is to read the early
versions first for their greater immediate impact, and the revised versions
afterwards for their greater subtlety and depth. For most readers this
book will be a First Auden, and the later collections are recommended as
a Second.
Cách tốt nhất, làm quen Auden, là đọc những bài thơ đầu,
sau đó, đọc thơ sửa, tinh tế hơn, sâu lắng hơn...
Những dòng mà Edward Mendelson viết về sự sửa thơ của Auden,
quái làm sao, “mắc mớ gì đó”, với thái độ không sửa thơ, và thái độ, không
“viết lại”, hay “lại viết”, sau khi ra tù VC
Most criticism, however, has taken a censorious view of Auden's
revisions, and the issue is an important one because behind it is a larger
dispute about Auden's theory of poetry.
In making his revisions, and in justifying them as he did, Auden was systematically
rejecting a whole range of modernist assumptions about poetic form, the
nature of poetic language, and the effects of poetry on its audience. Critics
who find the changes deplorable generally argue, in effect, that a poet
loses his right to revise or reject his work after he publishes it-as if
the skill with which he brought his poems from their early drafts to the
point of publication somehow left him at the moment they appeared, making
him a trespasser on his own work thereafter. This argument presupposes the
romantic notion that poetic form is, or ought to be, "organic," that an authentic
poem is shaped by its own internal forces rather than by the external effects
of craft; versions of this idea survived as central tenets of modernism.
In revising his poems, Auden opened his workshop to the public, and the spectacle
proved unsettling, especially as his revisions, unlike Yeats', moved against
the current of literary fashion. In the later part of his career, he increasingly
called attention in his essays to the technical aspects of verse, the details
of metrical and stanzaic construction-much as Brecht had brought his stagehands
into the full view of the audience. The goal in each case was to
remove the mystery that surrounds works of art, to explode the myth of poetic
inspiration, and to deny any special privileges to poetry in the realm of
language or to artists in the realm of ethics.
Critics mistook this attitude as a "rejection" of poetry…
Cái câu Gấu gạch dưới, giải thích thái độ của TTT, khi không
viết nữa, và nó mắc mớ tới vấn đề đạo hạnh của nghệ sĩ.
Bài thơ hiển hách nhất của Auden, với riêng Gấu, và tất nhiên,
với Brodsky – ông đọc nó khi bị lưu đầy nội xứ ở 1 nông trường cải tạo, và
khám phá ra cõi thơ của chính ông! – là bài tưởng niệm Yeats
http://tanvien.net/Dayly_Poems/Auden.html
In Memory of W B. Yeats
(d.January 1939)
Bạn thì cũng cà chớn như chúng
tớ: Tài năng thiên bẩm của bạn sẽ sống sót điều đó, sau cùng;
Nào cao
đường minh kính của những mụ giầu có, sự hóa lão của cơ thể.
Chính bạn;
Ái Nhĩ Lan khùng đâm bạn vào thơ
Bây giờ
thì Ái Nhĩ Lan có cơn khùng của nó, và thời tiết của ẻn thì vưỡn thế
Bởi là vì
thơ đếch làm cho cái chó gì xẩy ra: nó sống sót
Ở trong
thung lũng của điều nó nói, khi những tên thừa hành sẽ chẳng bao giờ muốn
lục lọi; nó xuôi về nam,
Từ những
trang trại riêng lẻ và những đau buồn bận rộn
Những thành
phố nguyên sơ mà chúng ta tin tưởng, và chết ở trong đó; nó sống sót,
Như một
cách ở đời, một cái miệng.
Thời gian vốn không khoan dung
Đối với những con người can đảm và thơ ngây,
Và dửng dưng trong vòng một tuần lễ
Trước cõi trần xinh đẹp,
Thờ phụng ngôn ngữ và tha thứ
Cho những ai kia, nhờ họ, mà nó sống;
Tha thứ sự hèn nhát và trí trá,
Để vinh quang của nó dưới chân chúng.
Thời gian
với nó là lời bào chữa lạ kỳ
Tha thứ cho Kipling và những quan điểm của ông ta
Và sẽ tha thứ cho… Gấu Cà Chớn
Tha thứ cho nó, vì nó viết bảnh quá!
Trong ác mộng của bóng tối
Tất cả lũ chó Âu Châu sủa
Và những quốc gia đang sống, đợi,
Mỗi quốc gia bị cầm tù bởi sự thù hận của nó;
Nỗi ô nhục tinh thần
Lộ ra từ mỗi khuôn mặt
Và cả 1 biển thương hại nằm,
Bị khoá cứng, đông lạnh
Ở trong mỗi con mắt
Hãy đi thẳng, bạn thơ ơi,
Tới tận cùng của đêm đen
Với giọng thơ không kìm kẹp của bạn
Vẫn năn nỉ chúng ta cùng tham dự cuộc chơi
Với cả 1 trại thơ
Làm 1 thứ rượu vang của trù eỏ
Hát sự không thành công của con người
Trong niềm hoan lạc chán chường
Trong sa mạc của con tim
Hãy để cho con suối chữa thương bắt đầu
Trong nhà tù của những ngày của anh ta
Hãy dạy con người tự do làm thế nào ca tụng.
February 1939
W.H. Auden
March 20, 2014 Issue
The
Secret Auden
Edward Mendelson
1.
W.H. Auden had a secret life
that his closest friends knew little or nothing about. Everything about it
was generous and honorable. He kept it secret because he would have been
ashamed to have been praised for it.
I learned about it mostly by
chance, so it may have been far more extensive than I or anyone ever knew.
Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that
Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York. She told
me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night
terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment
until she felt safe again.
Someone else recalled that Auden
had once been told that a friend needed a medical operation that he couldn’t
afford. Auden invited the friend to dinner, never mentioned the operation,
but as the friend was leaving said, “I want you to have this,” and handed
him a large notebook containing the manuscript of The Age of
Anxiety. The University of Texas bought the notebook and the friend had
the operation.
From some letters I found in
Auden’s papers, I learned that a few years after World War II he had arranged
through a European relief agency to pay the college costs for two war orphans
chosen by the agency, an arrangement that continued, with a new set of orphans
every few years, until his death at sixty-six in 1973.
At times, he went out of his
way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was
producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester
Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office
demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his
contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally
arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone
noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New
York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs
to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and
the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.
At literary gatherings he made
a practice of slipping away from “the gaunt and great, the famed for conversation”
(as he called them in a poem) to find the least important person in the room.
A letter-writer in the Times of London last year recalled one such incident:
Sixty years ago my English teacher
brought me to London from my provincial grammar school for a literary conference.
Understandably, she abandoned me for her friends when we arrived, and I was
left to flounder. I was gauche and inept and had no idea what to do with
myself. Auden must have sensed this because he approached me and said, “Everyone
here is just as nervous as you are, but they are bluffing, and you must learn
to bluff too.”
Late in life Auden wrote self-
revealing poems and essays that portrayed him as insular and nostalgic, still
living imaginatively in the Edwardian world of his childhood. His “Doggerel
by a Senior Citizen” began, “Our earth in 1969/Is not the planet I call mine,”
and continued with disgruntled complaints against the modern age: “I cannot
settle which is worse,/The Anti-Novel or Free Verse.” A year after he wrote
this, I chanced on a first book by a young poet, N.J. Loftis, Exiles and Voyages.
Some of the book was in free verse; much of it alluded to Harlem and Africa;
the author’s ethnic loyalties were signaled by the name of the publisher,
the Black Market Press. The book was dedicated “To my first friend, W.H. Auden.”
A few years later I got a phone
call from a Canadian burglar who told me he had come across Auden’s poems
in a prison library and had begun a long correspondence in which Auden gave
him an informal course in literature. Auden was especially pleased to get
him started on Kafka. He was equally helpful to unknown young poets who sent
him their poems, offering detailed help on such technical matters as adjectives
and enjambment.
When he felt obliged to stand
on principle on some literary or moral issue, he did so without calling attention
to himself, and he was impatient with writers like Robert Lowell whose political
protests seemed to him more egocentric than effective. When he won the National
Medal for Literature in 1967, he was unwilling either to accept it in Lyndon
Johnson’s White House during the Vietnam War or “to make a Cal Lowell gesture
by a public refusal,” so he arranged for the ceremony to be held at the Smithsonian,
where he gave an acceptance speech about the corruption of language by politics
and propaganda.
He was always professional in
his dealings with editors and publishers, uncomplainingly rewriting whole
essays when asked—except on at least two occasions when he quietly sacrificed
money and fame rather than falsify his beliefs. In 1964, for his translation
(with Leif Sjöberg) of Dag Hammarskjöld’s posthumous Markings, he wrote a
foreword that mentioned Hammarskjöld’s “narcissistic fascination with himself”
and alluded almost invisibly to Hammarskjöld’s homosexuality, which Auden
perceived as something entirely inward to Hammarskjöld and never acted upon:
A “thorn in the flesh” which
convinces him that he can never hope to experience what, for most people,
are the two greatest joys earthly life has to offer, either a passionate
devotion returned, or a lifelong happy marriage.
He also alluded to Hammarskjöld’s
inner sense of a messianic, sacrificial mission—something he seems to have
recognized as a version of the messianic fantasy to which he had himself
been tempted by his youthful fame as a revolutionary left-wing poet.
Auden had been Hammarskjöld’s
candidate for the Nobel Prize, and was widely expected to win it in 1964.
Soon after Hammarskjöld’s executors and friends saw Auden’s typescript, he
was visited by a Swedish diplomat who hinted that the Swedish Academy would
be unhappy if it were printed in its present form, that perhaps it could
be revised. Auden ignored the hint, and seems to have mentioned the incident
only once, when he went to dinner with his friend Lincoln Kirstein the same
evening and said, “There goes the Nobel Prize.” The prize went to Jean-Paul
Sartre, who refused it.
Two years later, Life magazine
offered him $10,000 for an essay on the fall of Rome, the last of a series
by multiple authors titled “The Romans.” Auden’s typescript ended with his
reflections on the fall of two empires:
I think a great many of us are
haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the
United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation,
whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going
to go smash, and probably deserves to.
The editors refused to inflict
this on their patriotic mass-market readership in the era of the Pax Americana,
and asked Auden to rewrite it. He declined, knowing that the piece would
be dropped and that he would be paid nothing. Scholars have known for years
that he had written the essay—an editor rescued it from the files when it
was about to be discarded—but no one seemed to know why it never appeared.
Auden may have told the story only to one friend, Thekla Clark, who retold
it in a documentary film, Wystan: The Life, Love and Death of a Poet, by Michael
Buergermeister, which had its premiere in Oxford last year.
Auden had many motives for portraying
himself as rigid or uncaring when he was making unobtrusive gifts of time,
money, and sympathy. In part he was reacting against his own early fame as
the literary hero of the English left. In 1937, before he turned thirty,
a London paper printed on its front page the news that he had gone to Madrid
planning to drive an ambulance for the beleaguered Republic in the Spanish
civil war. (He was instead put to work broadcasting propaganda, and, after
visiting the front, quietly left, disheartened by some of the actions of
his own side.)
In 1939 he left England for
America, partly to escape his own public status. Six months later, after
making a speech at a political meeting, he wrote to a friend:
I suddenly found I could really
do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience
roaring…. It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered
with dirt afterwards.
He was disgusted by his early
fame because he saw the mixed motives behind his image of public virtue,
the gratification he felt in being idolized and admired. He felt degraded
when asked to pronounce on political and moral issues about which, he reminded
himself, artists had no special insight. Far from imagining that artists
were superior to anyone else, he had seen in himself that artists have their
own special temptations toward power and cruelty and their own special skills
at masking their impulses from themselves.
In 1939, at thirty-two, he fell
in love with Chester Kallman and thought of their relation as a marriage.
Two years later, Kallman ended it because he could not endure Auden’s wish
for faithfulness. Auden reacted with murderous rage, probably toward Kallman,
possibly toward the man with whom Kallman had been unfaithful. A few months
later, he wrote in a verse letter to Kallman, “on account of you, I have
been, in intention, and almost in act, a murderer.”
By the time he wrote this, he
had begun to sense that he had caused the break between them by trying to
reshape Kallman into an ideal figure, an imaginary lover whom he valued more
than the real one. What Auden had thought of as love for the younger man
had been infected by libido dominandi, a lust for the power to transform
him into someone else. This was a temptation that everyone experienced, but
artists, he thought, were especially susceptible to it. He said in a lecture
on Shakespeare’s sonnets a few years later: “Art may spill over from creating
a world of language into the dangerous and forbidden task of trying to create
a human being.”
Earlier, in his twenties, when
he was trying to act as a political poet, he tried to write for a plural
audience—that is, for a group or category of readers who shared similar interests.
Later, he realized that he had always preferred to write as if addressing
an individual reader. He might have thousands of individual readers, but
he wrote as if speaking to one. “All the poems I have written were written
for love,” he said; “naturally, when I have written one, I try to market
it, but the prospect of a market played no role in its writing.”
A writer who addresses a plural
audience claims to deserve their collective attention. He must present himself
as the great modernists—Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound—more or less seriously
presented themselves, as visionary pioneers and cultural authorities, artist-heroes
setting an agenda for their time and their nation. In contrast, a writer
who addresses an individual reader presents himself as someone expert in
his métier but in every other way equal with his reader, having no moral
authority or special insight on anything beyond his art. Virginia Woolf,
who thought much as Auden did about these matters, rebuked her readers for
accepting an unequal relation with authors:
In your modesty you seem to
consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that
they know more of Mrs Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake.
It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part,
these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the
books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance
between us.
In an age when writers as different
as Hemingway and Eliot encouraged their public to admire them as heroic explorers
of the mind and spirit, Auden preferred to err in the opposite direction,
by presenting himself as less than he was.
2.
By refusing to claim moral or
personal authority, Auden placed himself firmly on one side of an argument
that pervades the modern intellectual climate but is seldom explicitly stated,
an argument about the nature of evil and those who commit it.
On one side are those who, like
Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash,
but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and
resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous.
On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am
a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose
motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has
dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its
inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when,
in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive.
One of many forms this argument
takes is a dispute over the meaning of the great totalitarian evils of the
twentieth century: whether they reveal something about all of humanity or
only about the uniquely evil leaders, cultures, and nations that committed
them. For Auden, those evils made manifest the kinds of evil that were potential
in everyone. Looking out from the attic room in peaceful, rural Austria where
he composed his poems, he wrote (in “The Cave of Making”):
More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous,
loveable,
but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again:
we know that, subjectively,
all is possible.
“We,” that is to say, know collectively
what is possible “subjectively” in the mind of each individual person.
In “September 1, 1939,” he dismissed
the fantasy that anyone’s private life could be innocent of the evils that
so obviously drove public life. Individual persons know subjectively—as if
looking in a mirror—that they treat others as objects to be used, just as
nations do:
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
He observed to friends how common
it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as
if he were invading Poland.
Like everyone who thought more
or less as he did, Auden didn’t mean that erotic greeds were morally equivalent
to mass murder or that there was no difference between himself and Hitler.
He was less interested in the obvious distinction between a responsible citizen
and an evil dictator than he was in the more difficult question of what the
citizen and dictator had in common, how the citizen’s moral and psychological
failures helped the dictator to succeed.
Those who hold the opposite
view, the view that the citizen and dictator have nothing in common, tend
to hold many corollary views. One such corollary is that a suitable response
to the vast evil of Nazi genocide is wordless, uncomprehending awe—because
citizen and dictator are different species with no language they can share.
Another corollary view is that Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963),
was offensively wrong about the “banality of evil,” because evil is something
monstrous, exotic, and inhuman. The acts and thoughts of a good citizen,
in this view, can be banal, not those of a dictator or his agents.
Auden stated a view like Arendt’s
as early as 1939, in his poem “Herman Melville”:
Evil is unspectacular and always
human,
And shares our bed and eats
at our own table.
He later quoted Simone Weil’s
pensée on the same theme, written around the same time: “Imaginary evil is
romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”
The view that the citizen and
dictator have nothing in common has another corollary: the view that the
dictator’s victims are inherently innocent, not merely innocent victims of
someone else’s evil, but innocent in everything, so that even after the murderous
dictator has been destroyed, their own actions, no matter how oppressive
or unjust, may not be judged by the same standard as his actions. As victims
of irrational hatred, they cannot imagine themselves acting on comparable
hatreds. Against this fantasy of inherent innocence, Auden recognized that
victims, no matter how guiltless in their own victimization, are tempted
to become victimizers in turn. As he put it briskly in a song, “Many a sore
bottom finds/A sorer one to kick.”
Auden took intellectual pleasure
in sorting people into types and anti-types. Much of his work dramatizes
a distinction between gentle-minded Arcadians, who dream of an innocent past
where everyone could do as they wanted without harming anyone else, and stern-minded
Utopians, who fantasize, and sometimes try to build, an ideal future in which
all will act as they should. He identified himself as an Arcadian, but he
never imagined that Utopians, no matter how much he disliked being around
them, were solely to blame for public and private injustice, and he always
reminded himself that Arcadians were not as innocent as they thought.
In “Under Which Lyre,” his 1946
Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, he made a similar distinction under different
names. Instead of Arcadians and Utopians, he described the unending war for
the human heart between the playful children of Hermes the trickster and
the authoritarian children of law-giving Apollo, and he urged his fellow
irresponsibles to resist Apollo’s battalions. But he told a friend afterward,
“I have a bit of Apollo in me too.” He later told another friend that he
had authoritarian impulses in himself that he despised but could never entirely
abolish.
In his prose poem “Vespers,”
an Arcadian and a Utopian unwillingly perceive that each shares in the guilt
of their civilization, that each is responsible for the “cement of blood”
without which “no secular wall will safely stand.” When the two encounter
each other at a crossroads, neither speaks, but each knows what the other
thinks:
Both simultaneously recognize
his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian.
He notes, with contempt, my
Aquarian belly: I note, with alarm, his Scorpion’s mouth.
He would like to see me cleaning
latrines: I would like to see him removed to some other planet.
Far from responding to Nazi
genocide with wordless awe, Auden understood it as an extreme case of something
all too comprehensible, the pandemic fantasy of building New Jerusalem in
the real world:
Even Hitler, I imagine, would
have defined his New Jerusalem as a world where there are no Jews, not as
a world where they are being gassed by the million day after day in ovens,
but he was a Utopian, so the ovens had to come in.
When Auden reviewed Isaiah Berlin’s
The Hedgehog and the Fox in 1954, he offered an alternative to Berlin’s antithesis
of hedgehogs who know one thing and foxes who know many. Improvising on Alice
in Wonderland, he contrasted strong-minded Alices, confident in their moral
rightness, with weak-minded Mabels, content to think as everyone else thinks.
His antithesis had more to do with moral self-knowledge than with knowledge
of the world.
Berlin was Auden’s lifelong
friend, and Auden was demurring gently at the Alice-like qualities he sensed
in Berlin’s book. One especially memorable statement by Berlin of the Alice-like
views that Auden distrusted occurs in his later essay on Turgenev (printed,
among other places, in these pages). Berlin wrote: “The dilemma of morally
sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute
polarization of opinion has, since [Turgenev’s] time, grown acute and world-wide.”
Whatever Berlin intended, a sentence like this encourages readers to count
themselves among the sensitive, honest, and responsible, with the inevitable
effect of blinding themselves to their own insensitivities, dishonesties,
and irresponsibilities, and to the evils committed by a group, party, or
nation that they support. Their “dilemma” is softened by the comforting thought
of their merits.
Auden wrote a poem about complacency
and its pleasures, pleasures that he knew he shared, though he understood
their delusions. The poem was “Lakes” (1952):
Only a very wicked or conceited
man,
About to sink somewhere in mid-Atlantic,
Could think Poseidon’s frown
was meant for him in person,
But it is only human to believe
The little lady of the glacier
lake has fallen
In love with the rare bather
whom she drowns.
In the final stanza Auden wondered
which kind of lake—“Moraine, pot, oxbow, glint, sink, crater, piedmont, dimple”—he
would choose if he could own one, and ended on an ironic note of complacent
pleasure: “Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy.” He first published
the poem with no dedication; when he reprinted it a few months after reviewing
The Hedgehog and the Fox he dedicated it “For Isaiah Berlin.”
Auden’s sense of his divided
motives was inseparable from his idiosyncratic Christianity. He had no literal
belief in miracles or deities and thought that all religious statements about
God must be false in a literal sense but might be true in metaphoric ones.
He felt himself commanded to an absolute obligation—which he knew he could
never fulfill—to love his neighbor as himself, and he alluded to that commandment
in a late haiku: “He has never seen God/but, once or twice, he believes/he
has heard Him.” He took communion every Sunday and valued ancient liturgy,
not for its magic or beauty, but because its timeless language and ritual
was a “link between the dead and the unborn,” a stay against the complacent
egoism that favors whatever is contemporary with ourselves. The book he wrote
while returning in 1940 to the Anglican Communion of his childhood was titled
The Double Man. It had an epigraph from Montaigne: “We are, I know not how,
double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid
ourselves of what we condemn.” He felt obliged to reveal to his neighbor
what he condemned in himself.
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