'Time, We Both Know, Will Decay You'

An old friend, just months older than me, is taking longevity hard. We’re not that old – he just turned seventy-four, I’m still seventy-three – but he frets about decrepitude, pain and death. I remind him there’s an alternative to a long life but he sniffs away such a reminder as impertinent: “Not funny!” 

W.H. Auden wrote “Talking to Myself” (Epistle to a Godson, 1972) in April 1971, when my friend and I were freshmen roommates at the university. Auden dedicates the poem to his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks and addresses it to himself or rather his body, in the second person. The poet (b. 1907) would die just two years later but a lifetime of Benzedrine, alcohol and tobacco was already taking its toll. In the seventh of the poem’s fifteen stanzas, Auden writes:

 

“Seldom have You been a bother. For many years

You were, I admit, a martyr to horn-colic

(it did no good to tell You – But I’m not in love!):

How stoutly, though, You’ve repelled all germ invasions,

But never chastised my tantrums with a megrim.”

 

Auden was a devoted reader of the Oxford English Dictionary. Horn-colic is antiquated slang for an involuntary erection and megrim is an obsolete term for a migraine, the subject of Sacks’ first book. In 2015, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Sacks published in The New York Times “My Own Life,” in which he wrote:

 

“My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

 

Sacks would die on August 30, 2015, at age eighty-two. Here is the final stanza of Auden’s poem:

 

“Time, we both know, will decay You, and already

I’m scared of our divorce: I’ve seen some horrid ones.

Remember: when Le bon Dieu says to You Leave him!,

Please, please, for His sake and mine, pay no attention

To my piteous Don’ts, but bugger off quickly.”