Four Hundred Years Ago
A long time ago, when I was in college - not 400 years, however much it feels that way sometimes - but a significant fraction of 400, I read John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613”. I wrote a paper about it. And I remember thinking that I should, if I lived that long, revisit it on the far-distant Good Friday of the strange-sounding year 2013.
I guess at one time I was interested in revisiting things. In high school, along with some friends, I had developed a pathetic Tolkien-inspired mythology, and every May 4th we were going to get together and .... I can’t remember what. Wouldn’t it be odd if the others actually have been getting together every May 4th? I hope they at least have the decency to wonder “whatever happened to that sagacious guy who came up with this idea?”
And that reminds me of some other friends. When I was in college, there was a room where we used to meet, with vending machines and a microwave. Once upon a time there was a ... no, I’ve been listening to Mary Hopkin lately, but I won’t get further distracted. Shannon, Pickerill, O’Ryan, Lesley and I were there one day, and O’Ryan said (jokingly) “let’s meet here ten years from today.”
He got up to get something from one of the machines, and Shannon (or was it Pickerill? In some respects their humor was the same) said “Let’s fool him. We’ll come the day before.”
About the only “revisiting” I’ve actually done is the Fool’s Errand, or Sentimental Journey, but that’s a story I’ve already told.
But this is just stalling, to evade the fact that the paper on Donne has disappeared into the oblivion it surely deserved, along with all my college papers except “Lear’s Blindness” and “Robinson Crusoe”. The composition of “Lear’s Blindness” might actually be a story worth telling some time. For now I’ll just say that telling the professor “I haven’t finished typing it” is literally true of a paper which I had in fact not even composed yet, nor even selected a topic for, due to a misunderstanding about the date it was to be submitted.
I read the Donne poem again today, and it’s as powerful as it was when I first read it. Whatever one believes,
“Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?”
is an arresting thought.
But nothing I could say about it could rival the recent article in the Times Literary Supplement so I’ll use the blogger’s cheap trick of linking to that:
The article says the actual anniversary of the date is April 2nd; but I wonder if that takes the calendar reform into account? Is the actual actual date April 13?
I could look it up. Or, I could post this - it’s already Saturday - and go to bed. But, come to think of it, Donne was traveling to Wales four hundred years ago. It wouldn’t hurt to listen to Mary Hopkin’s version of “Morning Has Broken” one more time, would it?
Next time: followups to “Although the Aircraft Remains Under Control”.
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