`Sense the Solving Emptiness'

My campus adjoins the largest medical district in the world, home to 13 hospitals, two medical schools, 45 other medicine-related facilities, and more than 5 million patients each year. Its proximity is a comfort, I suppose, knowing care is near, but also a goad to Schadenfreude in the sense of relief, not sadistic enjoyment of another’s suffering. One learns not to hear the auditory memento mori of helicopters and ambulances. Not hearing is a way of implicitly saying, “It’s not me this time.” Or, “It’s not me this time.” Such strategies and reflections are the invisible terrain Philip Larkin stamped as his own – the drab, uneasy, unacknowledged moral accommodations each of us makes with self and world. Here is Larkin’s “Ambulances”:

“Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

“Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

“And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

“For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

“At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.”

“Ambulances” gives the lie to the notion that Larkin is a heartless cynic. He’s not sentimental and doesn’t conform to conduits of conventional feeling, and some readers confuse this with coldness. The passing of the ambulance prompts us to “sense the solving emptiness/That lies just under all we do.” “Solving” is masterful. Larkin turns a daily bit of bad news into a communally human act. Patients ride in vehicles “Closed like confessionals.” and “lie/Unreachable inside a room.” We, the passersby, pause to look at the ambulance which “Brings closer what is left to come,/And dulls to distance all we are.”