REMEMBRANCES OF THINGS PAST - 1
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress”
W.B. YEATS, Sailing to Byzantium
Wrote W.B. Yeats in his magnificent poem a few years before his death, lamenting what the world had become. The world is not any different even now! It is a case of History repeating itself.
Having reached a respectable age that qualifies calling myself “aged”, I look back on life like Jesting Pilate questioning everything I have seen, read, studied and been told. I do not claim to have had answers to every question of mine. Life has so many mysteries that every day is a new mysterious beginning of something beautiful if we have eyes to perceive. We all have eyes to see; but not all have eyes to perceive. It is essential to have eyes to perceive to grapple the mysteries of Life.
Having read Yeats fairly closely, I realize that I am paltry like all others have been PALTRY. All great writers, great scientists and great thinkers have been PALTRY for most of us because our SOULS have not clapped their hands and sung loudly to account for every tatter in our coat. In other words nobody understands the wisdom of sages who are too old to command respect amidst the younger generation caught up in its own dance and song. I am not condemning anyone, but only speaking the truth.
Moment of truth will arrive for all only when they are old and ripe with wisdom of life and age which they want to pass on to the future generation that is in turn caught up in its own song and dance that enthrall them as they progress through life blundering, hitting roadblocks and “fall upon the thorns of life”. Then they realize what their forebears were trying to tell them, feeble with age but ripe with wisdom. However this drama will go on endlessly and we like Tiersias shall helplessly watch it as T.S. Eliot wrote in THE WASTELAND.
"And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;"
Great literature, great music, great art all shall be for the multitudes as “landscape to a blind man’s eye”. That is the price that humankind has had to pay for the dilution of standards and interest due to rapid industrialization and advance in scientific inventions. However all great Literature and other Arts are available at hand in libraries and museums when our soul wearied with existence searches for oases of meaning and relaxation.
It is only as we near the end of our earthly existence and are about to shuffle off our “mortal coil” that we are able to understand faintly the meaning of existence and the value of each tatter in our coat. That is also the stage when we look for the Byzantium that we never bothered about previously and which shall still elude us as we do not have the means to seek it out, let alone reach it.
