Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This… as Annie Lennox sang. Song reverberating from Thursday’s Wedding Party in Greenwich.
Don’t know whether it was age, drink [lack of], or just the realisation that the kids are grown up and almost so adult that they superficially don’t need us that much; that I didn’t sleep that well overnight. Dropping Lil at the station at 5.40 for the train up to London and Chadwell Heath brought that home. Shades of Intimations of Immortality! That’s for another ramble at a later date. The lines are too full to quote verbatim in this piece but:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
Coupling that with having read the BBC article on the deaths of the great and good in 2016, I start to think that we are far too gloom and doom merchants than aught else and from last night’s dreams of the Lucy Poems variety only make worry and depression self-fulfilling. Once fully awake and conscious, they disappear. I’m not a great one for thinking in the physical dark of night. That is too depressing just as is trying to cycle in the gloom of winter mornings.
