'The Role Is a Role Worth Perfecting'

“The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that there is nothing the free man thinks of less than he does of death. But that sort of free man is no more than a dead man; he is free only from life’s wellspring, lacking in love, a slave to his freedom. The thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come afterwards constitutes the very heartbeat of my consciousness.” 

Thanks to Isaac Bashevis Singer I first encountered Spinoza in high school. I even wrote a short story about a misguided student trying to translate the Ethics without knowing much Latin. No passage in that difficult masterwork has inspired more thought among non-scholarly readers than Part 4 (“Of Human Bondage”), Proposition 67: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.”

 

The passage at the top is from the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), known as the “Sage of Salamanca,” who describes the Ethics as “a desperate elegiac poem.” I thought of him when reading “A Day in Salamanca” by the American poet Radcliffe Squires (1917-93). The poem was published in the Spring 1971 issue of The Sewanee Review and collected in Gardens of the World (1981):

 

“Across the square

The late sun angles down through arches

In golden cones against the violet

Shop windows. At a near table

A beautiful priest smiles at his expensive

Dessert; at another table, students, old-looking in

Their dark suits, talk erotically of revolution.

Then priest and students turn toward me with

The squint of conspirators

While a boy, leaning into the slanted sunlight

As though it were wind, comes slowly

Across the immense square, tacking into the light,

Until he stands at my table.

His big wrists glow six inches

Beyond the scarecrow sleeves,

As he holds a sparrow toward me

And chants: ‘Which shall it be, freedom

Or blood-sacrifice?’

 

“The bird peers

 From the noose of thumb and forefinger

 Tightening to show the way of sacrifice.

 I laugh. The boy scowls, his lips

 Curl back from wet teeth. He pushes nearer.

 A windowless smell of cooking oil comes

 From his clothes, but beneath that, faintly,

 The neutral perfume of all humanity, the smell

 (I think) of wheat fields motionless in sunlight.

I lean back, shrug, and say he does not have

The courage to kill a bird. The insult brings

The moment we have all waited for. The priest

Titters, the students freeze. The boy’s face,

Pressing nearer, blots out the square with

Its false sunset, whispering, ‘Libertad o sacrificio?’

And I drop the coin on the enameled table.

The bird spurts away like breath, but not far.

On a window ledge it waits, trying us

With one eye and then the other,

And when the boy whistles it comes to his hand.

From under his jacket he takes the small

Cage filigreed from pale clean wood,

Moorish bower where the bird enters

Like a spoiled princess.

 

“The priest and the students, bored now, turn away,

 But the boy and I smile at each other,

 Not decently nor gratefully, but with a certain love.

 Each day now for a week I have bought

 This same bird’s life from this same boy

 At this same table.

 

“Why not?

The century being the century it is,

The role is a role worth perfecting.”

 

I have no way of knowing if Squires was thinking of Unamuno while writing his poem, but the presence of the tittering priest, echoes of the Spanish Civil War, the boy’s act of deadly extortion and the speaker's complicity suggest his specter hovers over it. The final three lines serve as a post mortem of the twentieth century and a moral justification of paying to save another. The poem’s clarity suggests Mediterranean light. I wish I had encountered Squires and his poems long ago. What a poet.

 

[Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (Princeton, 1972) is translated by Anthony Kerrigan. The Ethics passage is from A Spinoza Reader, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, 1994). Go here to hear a reading of Squires’ poem.]