CALMLY WE WALK THROUGH THIS APRIL'S DAY
Delmore Schwartz
Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
from All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950) - as presented by Wikiquote:
ReplyDeleteThe sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ … of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them.
Jorts the Cat
ReplyDeleteIt wasn’t long before an official Jorts Twitter account was amassing tens of thousands of followers. But here’s where Jorts diverges from the usual viral story: Jorts came into the internet’s consciousness with a laugh, but he’s stuck around as a vehicle for social change.
The first thing I noticed, as someone who’s seen this happen a myriad of times in my decade-long career, was the way the (still anonymous) user approached merchandise. Rather than using virality to hawk T-shirts and mugs, the human behind Jorts’s Twitter account urged fans to “write I LIKE JORTS THE CAT on something you already have,” donate $28 to a strike fund, or adopt a cat from an animal shelter.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90737005/in-praise-of-jorts-the-cat-unlikely-labor-leader