`The Lot of Man'

For a week at sea I remained digitally free. No computer, no telephone, relying instead on print and conversation. My books were Larkin’s Complete Poems, Santayana’s The Realms of Being and Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey, all of which I’ve read and reread before. Travelling invites the familiar, and no poem is more familiar than “This Be the Verse.” As a challenge to myself, I often try to read a poem or other work that seems thoroughly familiar as though it were brand new. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes sufficient changes have taken place in me that the poem becomes new again. Perhaps that’s what characterizes the reading of any great work – something new and unexpected with every return. Take these lines from “This Be the Verse,” read somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico:  “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf.” I was marooned on a ship of hangovers, queasiness and bellyaches. The contrast between intent and result was never so obvious. On the date, Dec. 29, in 1753, Dr. Johnson writes in The Adventurer #120: 

“There is, indeed, no topick on which it is more superfluous to accumulate authorities, nor any assertion of which our own eyes will more easily discover, or our sensations more frequently impress the truth, than, that misery is the lot of man, that our present state is a state of danger and infelicity.”