You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and you still watch the golden afternoon light fall on the face you love, you know that the light will fade soon, you know that the face you love will one day fade into indifference or bone, and you love anyway – because life is fleeting but possible, because love alone combines the impossible and the eternal.
I'm thinking of this and a passage from Louise Erdrich's 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flies in the sky of my mind:
Life will break you. No one can protect you from that, and being alone will not protect you, because being alone will also destroy your longing. You have to love. You have to feel it. That is the reason for being here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You have come to be swallowed. And when you happen to be broken, or betrayed, or abandoned, or injured, or a brush with death nearby, allow yourself to sit by the apple tree and listen to the apples falling around you in heaps, spoiling their sweetness. Tell yourself to taste it as often as possible.
Yes, this is what life has become – a little bit of affirmation rising like a bright smoke from the cold black silence of an indifferent universe that will one day swallow you up. Every living thing is its own singer and master — something poet Loren Eiseley captures with extraordinary poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” which is found in his remarkable posthumous collection. Star Thrower (public library).
Eiseley tells of resting under a tree after a day of tearing through fern and pine needles gathering scraps, coming into the warm sunlight, only to be awakened by a great commotion to see “a great raven with a red beak and a moving beak” perched on an overhanging branch. You write:
Half a dozen small birds flew across the plain, drawn by the painful cries of the young parents. No one dared to attack the crow. But they wept there with the common natural grief, the bereaved and the dead. The glade was filled with their shrieks and cries. They flapped their wings as if pointing at the killer. There was a vague, intangible moral he had broken, they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the killer, the black bird in the heart of life, sat there, shining in the ordinary light, terrifying, motionless, undisturbed, untouched. The moaning died away. It was then that I saw judgment. It was a judgment of life versus death. I will never again see it presented with such force. I will never again hear from such long painful notes. Because in the middle of the protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that refinement, rose the sparkling note of the sparrow's song with doubtful silence. And at last, after a painful flight, one took up the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, no doubt at first, as if some evil thing were gradually forgotten. Until suddenly they are inspired and sing in many throats happily together as birds are known to sing. They sing because life is good and the sunshine is good. They sing under the shadow of the raven. In pure truth they had forgotten the raven, because they were singers of life, not of death.
A couple with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fear of basic loss, then revisit Loren Eiseley on warblers and the wonder of existence.
