Breakables

[Image: This post’s original title was Things Pass Away. Eventually that changed, obviously, but the phrase stuck in my head. Whence, I wondered, did I remember that “things pass away” phrase? A Google search provided ambiguous results: the full phrase appeared to be either “ALL things pass away,” or “OLD things pass away.” So I turned to the Google Ngram viewer, which counts the number of occurrences over time of one or more phrases, across the entire corpus of books scanned into Google Books OCR-searchable form. The results were illuminating — indicating (to me, at least) that the English-speaking world is much more cynical these days than it was prior to, say, 1860 or so: the proportion of references to the impermanence of ALL things has remained more or less unchanged over time, but the importance of singling out OLD things as temporary, well, who cares about them, anyhow? (More thoughts on this in the note below.)]

From whiskey river:

How Angels Sleep. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude…

Also, they don’t dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

Microcosmos

When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it’s still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them.

But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.

The glass doesn’t even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.

To say they’re many isn’t saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they’re multiplied.

They don’t even have decent innards.
They don’t know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are—or aren’t.
Still they decide our life and death.

Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don’t know what their moment is.
Since they’re so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.

A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.

I’ve wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it’s a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.

(Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh [source])

…and:

The Outcry

What I want to do is shout. Happiness? No.
Outrage? No. What I want to do is shout
because we were all wrong, because the point
was not the point, because the world, or what
we took for the world, is breaking, breaking. We were wrong
and are not right. Break! Break! We are here!
What I want to do is shout! Break! Shout!

(William Bronk [source, apparently, but unconfirmed])

Not from whiskey river:

(Antonio Machado [source])

…and:

My Hero

Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,
the tortoise has stopped once again
by the roadside,
this time to stick out his neck
and nibble a bit of sweet grass,
unlike the previous time
when he was distracted
by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

_____

Note: The phrase “old things pass away” seems traceable not exclusively, but primarily, to the Bible (specifically, the New Testament’s II Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 17). I think the fact of the “old things pass away” phrase’s origin in the Bible is probably why the Google Ngram usage curve for that specific phrasing has declined so steeply over the last couple centuries. After all, progressively less and less of the world’s total output of English verbiage is Bible-centered, or even Bible-referencing.

You can play similar games with the Ngram Viewer, comparing other common Biblically sourced phrases with related ones still in common use today. For instance:

Here, the phrase “all things are possible” derives most likely from a fuller version, “with God, all things are possible” (from the Book of Matthew), and drops in about the same way as the curve for “old things pass away” discussed above.

Note 2: I almost never know where these Friday posts will lead me. I just don’t usually expose the process so publicly!