'To Glorify Things Just Because They Are'

My father by trade was an ironworker and on the side he ran a welding business. The garage was his workshop. There he kept the usual oxy-acetylene gear, used when he was making wrought-iron railings. For certain jobs he relied on the arc welder. Whenever the lights in the house flickered we knew he was using it. The drain on power was enormous. To this day, whenever the lights dim during an electrical storm, I think of my father and his welding shop. I also think of “Blacksmith Shop” by Czesław Miłosz: 

“I liked the bellows operated by rope.

A hand or foot pedal – I don’t remember which.

But that blowing, and the blazing of the fire!

And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,

Red, softened for the anvil,

Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,

Thrown into a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.

And horses hitched to be shod,

Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river

Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,

Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds.

I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:

To glorify things just because they are.”

 

A complicated set of memories and associations continues. As an American I think of Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” (“the muscles of his brawny arms / Are strong as iron bands”). Like my paternal grandparents, Miłosz, their younger contemporary, was born in Poland and emigrated to the U.S. My grandfather, whom I never met, was also an ironworker. I met a working blacksmith for the first time in 1998 at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., and spent an hour talking to the smithy as he made horseshoes. I already knew the Miłosz poem and remembered it while we talked. The concluding lines I have memorized: “It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are.” I can’t think of a more worthy calling – expressing a sense of gratitude for existence.

 

In “What the New Atheists Don’t See” (Not with a Bang but a Whimper, 2008), Theodore Dalrymple writes:

 

“If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.”

 

[“Blacksmith Shop” was translated from the Polish by Miłosz and Robert Hass and published in Provinces (1991). Miłosz was born on this date, June 30, in 1911, and died in 2004 at age ninety-four.]