Thursday, January 04, 2007

Capacity to Love   [John Derbyshire]

To Wesley's remark about "increasing our capacity to love":  Frankly, I can't think of a worse idea.

That's an instinctual reaction that I'd explain at length if I had time, and perhaps will at some future date.  Meanwhile, here are some lines of Philip Larkin's that flutter pretty close to the flame.  The poem is called "Faith Healing."  It's about that:  A faith healing session run by an American preacher and attended (apparently) only by women, and not the kind of women you are going to see in  People magazine:  "Moustached in flowered frocks they shake..."   Here are the closing lines:

...In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.  An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them—-that, and the voice above
Saying 'Dear child,' and all time has disproved.

01/04 09:19 AMShare