Sophistry and Sambuca

At some point I decided that hard science and research were more meaningful contributions than art. Even though I liked poetry – Victorian English, or W.C. Williams, or John Donne – and even though the cinema of the aughts had blown my mind with its storytelling. LML once wrote me: “I always wondered why you went to Chicago and went into a lab. ... I never saw you with lab glasses and a white coat (even more so with AC, MD scribbled across a pocket).”

Maybe I made a mistake, committing a decade and a half of my life to chemistry and physics. Those years were an uphill, a salmon-in-stream, struggle that in the end didn't work out and in retrospect never fit right. Maybe I was never the right person for it.

In a way, I think maybe poetry (I know, how erudite, how pedantic) saved my life. I've been hospitalized again and again as an adult, and each time it's been a book of poetry that’s gotten me through it. And some poems just stay with you. In Arcadia, Bernard says at one point:

“I cant think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Leave me out, I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.' There you are, he wrote it after coming home from a party.”

(Act II, Scene 5)

Before he left for college, my brother bought me a book of Yeats' poetry, and those poems (“I balanced all, brought all to mind” or “Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, and now ... I must endure the timid sun”) I carried through my teens. And Tennyson's “Ulysses” (“My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the Western stars”) helped carry me through grad school.

Reminding me that others have felt the way I feel and struggled in the same ways. That I'm not alone, however alone I might feel. And to hold on, that maybe there are other experiences out there, too:

“The Earth, the Seas, the Light, the Day, the Skies, The Sun and Stars are mine; if those I prize.” (“The Salutation”, Thomas Traherne)