Continuities
by Walt Whitman
(From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist)
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.
__________
Nothing is ever lost--All the King's Men.
I feel lost. I am not nothing, because nothing is ever lost. I must be something.
Excuse my brief foray into self-esteem.
1 comment:
I'm more than a little impressed with Walt Whitman--whom the learn'd astronomer and his charts bored so intolerably, whose funeral Einstein could have attended at the age of thirteen--for penetrating the illusion of linear time in the nineteenth century.
Or perhaps it is his German spiritualist whose quantum intuitions were so startlingly keen.
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