`To Try to Take the Measure of Our Loss'

James Matthew Wilson asks in “Some Notes for Ecclesiastes” (Some Permanent Things, 2014):

“How does one stir

A dull eye to the poignancy and gift

Of all the things that are but need not be?”

Like a rich kid’s Christmas morning, the world overflows with gratuitous bounty. It’s also a slaughterhouse. Negotiating those truths across a lifetime winnows optimists from pessimists, but a prudent path between them seems sanest. Wilson’s poem, written “In Memoriam Rae Lee Lester,” is a gloss on Koheleth, almost a rebuke. He understands that Ecclesiastes in the wrong hands turns quickly into cynical, smug, impotent, wet-blanket doomsaying (“flint-lipped quietists”). Along with Job, it’s probably the biblical book most favored by the faithless. But Wilson starts his poem practically, almost optimistically, with George Herbert, “The parson, lonely in his vicarage / At Bemerton,” wanting to stir his flock.   

The title of Dr. Johnson’s greatest poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” traces it lineage to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling his central lifelong theme. In his Dictionary, Johnson defined vanity as “emptiness, arrogance, falsehood.” For vain he gives “fruitless, meanly proud, idle.” Asked for a synonym today, many would respond with “egotism,” “self-centeredness,” “pride.” Only the last avoids the modern clinical taint and retains the older, moral/spiritual sense. In Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (2008), Jeffrey Meyers writes of “Human Wishes”:

“Believing with George Herbert that `A verse may finde him who a sermon flies,’ Johnson uses the poem to preach from a deeply pessimistic text. His title implies that certainty and truth can be found, despite the temptations of the world, only by adhering to a spiritual path and following God's will . . . Instead of emphasizing the joy and consolation of Christian belief, and the hope of redemption it offers, Johnson distilled into the poem twenty years of bitterness, failure, and struggle for faith. His poem is not simply pessimistic, but strains against optimism, against the possibility that human life could actually get better.”

Wilson is not naïve. Neither is he hard-boiled. He seeks wisdom, not finality:

“We do not need a shaking from our comfort

In how the seasons feed us, how the new

Wars are just like the old ones. What we ask

Is wisdom wise enough never to dare

To try to take the measure of our loss.”