Notæ

On Changing Lifespans and Hobnobbing with Poets

“Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment,” by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic

Photo illustrations by Sarah Palmer. Photos courtesy of Caitlin Flanagan.

You can’t jump people into Roman Catholicism after the age of reason; they have to “come to God” on their own, or be in some kind of trouble. We didn’t believe any of it, and not just because of what our parents had always told us. It didn’t sound plausible. We lay in our beds at night and fumed. At the baptism, Ellen and I would have to have water poured on our long hair, like a couple of idiots. We would have to say something about believing in God, and we would have to reject the devil and all his pomps. (Pomps : shows of magnificence, splendor. Enough said! Rejected!) We took our final lesson, and a rehearsal was staged. Someone made a fruitcake with marzipan icing. In Ireland, when a woman makes a fruitcake, there’s no turning back…

But then—like a dream, like a magic fish bone—word arrived from Belfast that Seamus and Marie Heaney were coming down for the event, and that Seamus would write a poem. That changed everything for me. Anything the Heaneys were cool with, I was cool with. They were my idea of what a dazzling couple ought to be, and they were always, always kind to us, and we needed kindness.

When Seamus stood up and read the poem, “Baptism: for Ellen and Kate Flanagan,” I accepted everything—all of it, all at once: poetry, God, and myself.

“Constellation of Genius: Miłosz, Camus, Einstein, and Weil,” by Cynthia L. Haven in Church Life Journal

Becky Matsubara, Wikimedia Commons.

Toward the end of his life, Miłosz described “second space,” a dimension outside our usual space and time, here and now…

Perhaps his sense of second space expanded his horizons beyond the loneliness and limitations of the exile. Perhaps “second space” was his final home. “I do not feel displaced,” he said in a 1982 New York Times interview. “I feel all the tragedies and excitements of this time, which is a very cosmopolitan time. Let us not create myths about exile if all of us, we’re exiles—hah? What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile.”

“An Idol of Autonomy,” by Leah Libresco Sargeant in The Dispatch

Illustration via Adrià Voltà.

But even a materialist perspective that doesn’t acknowledge a creator can concede that we are never truly “independent.” Moving past the desire for “death with dignity” requires admitting that autonomy is not the ordering principle of a human life. Every person begins their life as a burden to someone else. It isn’t pejorative to say so—a baby simply must be carried, first by just one woman, in utero, and then after birth as a shared burden among more bearers. 

Most of us (though not all of us) grow out of this severe, stark dependence, but our trajectory is an orbit, not an escape.

“What Have We Learned from Centuries of Chasing Immortality?” by Joe Kloc in The New York Times

Illustration by Claire Merchlinsky, The New York Times. Photos from Getty Images.

Humanity’s oldest epic is a doomed quest for immortality: Around four millenniums ago, the Sumerians told of a Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh who set out to find life everlasting and briefly located a youth-restoring plant, only to lose it on his way home. Two millenniums later, as the story goes, a Chinese magician named Xu Fu convinced the emperor that there was an elixir granting eternal life across the Yellow Sea. The emperor provided Xu Fu with ships and the 3,000 virgins that the magician claimed were essential to the quest. When the emperor found out he had made little progress, Xu Fu said he also needed an army, which the emperor furnished. Xu Fu set sail, and the emperor never saw him again.

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