'The Dead in Their Silences Keep Me in Memory'

Edwin Muir (1887-1959) I first knew as the translator with his wife Willa of Kafka’s novels and stories. I remember chancing on The Castle at the public library in the mid-sixties, knowing nothing about Kafka. Only now do I appreciate the debts incurred – to Kafka, to the Muirs. Edwin expresses my sense of obligation and gratitude, literary and otherwise, in his 1949 poem “The Debtor” (Collected Poems, 1953): 

“I am debtor to all, to all am I bounden,

Fellowman and beast, season and solstice, darkness and light,

And life and death. On the backs of the dead,

See, I am borne, on lost errands led,

By spent harvests nourished. Forgotten prayers

To gods forgotten bring blessings upon me.

Rusted arrow and broken bow, look, they preserve me

Here in this place. The never-won stronghold

That sank in the ground as the years into time,

Slowly with all its men steadfast and watching,

Keeps me safe now. The ancient waters

Cleanse me, revive me. Victor and vanquished

Give me their passion, their peace and the field.

The meadows of Lethe shed twilight around me.

The dead in their silences keep me in memory,

Have me in hold. To all I am bounden.”

 

I’ve always thought of now as an impoverished place. Those mired exclusively in the present, a small plot of real estate and in no sense a culmination, are indeed provincial. For them the past is nonexistent or so forbiddingly foreign as to be terra incognita, yet the past has never been so present. Though technology offers effortless access to virtually anything we wish to read, look at or listen to, the gifts of the past too often go squandered. This is nothing new. The present has traditionally regarded the past with arrogance, as youth does the aged. None of this is the same as uncritically romanticizing the past. Stevie Smith settled that notion a long time ago in “The Past” (Not Waving But Drowning, 1957):

  

“People who are always praising the past

And especially the time of faith as best

Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages

And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.”

 

Human nature hasn’t changed in millennia. Given the right opportunity we all turn into savages. The best we can do is learn and internalize the lessons and accomplishments of those who preceded us, and pass them on to those who come after us. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke writes: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”