#43 Accidents of Birth (William Meredith)

Este año he decidido contrabandear a Pascal en mi clase de filosofía. Tenemos una cierta flexibilidad para escoger los filósofos de los que queremos a hablar en "The Modern Mind"—que no es lo mismo que "History of Modern Philosophy"—pero Pascal está fuera de consideración. Lo hecho por motivos un poco egoístas: no había leído los Pensamientos y ya era hora. Qué maravilla y qué necesarios. He leído la edición con amplios comentarios de Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensées. Es una selección, acompañada de unos comentarios que son una fiesta. Kreeft dice que la zarza ardiente sonaba como Pascal. Así se deleita glosando los Pensamientos. Y para seguir disfrutando a Pascal, una poema pascaliano de William Meredith.

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ACCIDENTS OF BIRTH

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.

—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion


The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Spared by a car or airplane crash or

cured of malignancy, people look

around with new eyes at a newly

praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.

For I’ve been brought back again from the

fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie

down for long naps. And I’ve also been

pardoned miraculously for years

by the lava of chance which runs down

the world’s gullies, silting us back.

Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet

happened away.

But it’s not this random

life only, throwing its sensual

astonishments upside down on

the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,

not just me being here again, old

needer, looking for someone to need,

but you, up from the clay yourself,

as luck would have it, and inching

over the same little segment of earth-

ball, in the same little eon, to

meet in a room, alive in our skins,

and the whole galaxy gaping there

and the centuries whining like gnats—

you, to teach me to see it, to see

it with you, and to offer somebody

uncomprehending, impudent thanks.