Our only hope: to leap into the Word/ That opens a shuttered Universe

We live half our lives
in fantasy, and words.

["Interrupted Meditation", Robert Hass]

For instance, this morning: I looked at the sunrise behind Brock Hall and suddenly the words "the steeples swum in amethyst" wafted through my consciousness with that familiar shiver of delight. And later, walking with my mug of very bad coffee to my office, I saw the arbitrary gentle fall of snow and heard again a wisp of Dickinson, something about "sifting from leaden sieves."

How impoverished my life would be without its cargo of plundered ideas and phrases and metaphors! Despite my yearning for freshness and originality, I cannot imagine an existence unadulterated by the words of Dickinson, Oliver, Buechner... an existence lived outside of fantasy, and words.

I know that this attitude towards life seems naive and idealistic at best, escapist at worst. I do not deny that evil is uglier than I know, and that a time may come when I look at a sunrise or a leaden flurry, catch the familiar murmur of poetry, and feel the urge to shrug it away with a cynicism borne from acquaintance with the harsher realities of life.

I hope that when that time comes I will remember that fantasy and words are realities of life, too. I hope I will still believe that "language is responsible to being."

And that, miraculously, "there is a Word / at the end that explains."