'All the Mess That Makes Up You'

For much of 1939, W.H. Auden worked on The Prolific and the Devourer, a collection of aphorisms and reflections he abandoned a few weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland from the west, around the time the Soviets were invading from the east. The full text wasn’t published until 1981, eight years after his death, and it reflects Auden’s thinking at a pivotal moment in his life. He would soon leave England for the United States and a lingering Marxist sympathy for Christianity. Already a world-class poet, Auden in his thirties was growing up: 

“There are many people, and they number some artists among them, who today seek in politics an escape from the unhappiness of their private lives, as once people sought refuge in the monastery and convent. Driven by envy and hatred they spread discomfort wherever they go and ruin everything they touch. A wise political party will have nothing to do with them.”

 

More than eighty years on, Auden might be describing our world, c. 2022. That politics has usurped religious faith and often become an expression of private pathology is inarguable. No one turns political because he is happy and wishes to share his good fortune. Politics is no longer about patching potholes. It’s about adolescent petulance. The alternatives appear to be fanaticism or impotence. The sixties left us a pernicious scrap of bumper-sticker wisdom -- “All politics is personal.” False on the face of it, our young century has made it come true in a different sense. In his final installment of The Adventurer, published on this date, February 26, in 1754, Dr. Johnson reminds us of human limitation:   

 

“The power, indeed, of every individual is small, and the consequence of his endeavours imperceptible, in a general prospect of the world. Providence has given no man ability to do much, that something might be left for every man to do. The business of life is carried on by a general co-operation; in which the part of any single man can be no more distinguished, than the effect of a particular drop when the meadows are floated by a summer shower: yet every drop increases the inundation, and every hand adds to the happiness or misery of mankind.”

 

We are modest creatures with immodest pretensions. We confuse our discontent with the world’s. In “Admonition for the Seventh Decade” (Love in Another Language, 2017), Dick Davis suggests we look inward and come to terms with ourselves before taking it out on the rest of humanity:

 

“All the bluster and conceit,

All the hare-brained indiscreet

Obfuscations and obsessions,

All the ludicrous confessions,

Put them by now, put them by,

Clean them out before you die.

 

“Even though you can’t undo

All the mess that makes up you,

Find a modicum of quiet;

Quash the long uncivil riot

That goes on inside your heart;

Clear the drunks out, make a start.”