A Conversation in Oxford

For Isaiah Berlin

Euphonious if not in sync the bells

beat time in amber chapel towers,

and the time has come for tea and talk.

We settle in a room of many shades,

the questions you have spent the decades turning.

“What can we assume about this world?”

you wonder, once again. “What can we claim?”

So little, it would seem. The weak foundations

of all human knowledge make one shudder

to assume too much, to claim too boldly.

“What do you believe?” you ask, so frankly

that I redden, turn, avert my eyes.

“Is consciousness itself an end of foretaste

of a fuller life? This ‘oversoul’ that Emerson

proposed: Whatever does it mean?”

The honeying facades along the High Street

seem impervious to dwindling light;

whole generations are absorbed

in rheumy passages and darkened cloisters

where so many questions have been put

and left unanswered. It was not a failure

not to answer. I assume that you,

over the decades, have refused to grant

those easy answers that can dull a heart,

occlude a mind, can chain a soul.

You tap your pipe and offer this:

“Real liberty is found in fine gradations,

dartings of the mind—not Big Ideas,

which are mostly preludes to deceit,

embodiments of someone’s will-to-power.”

I scan the rows of volumes you have filled

with annotations in the well-kept nights—

from Plato to Descartes, from Kant to Kripke.

Herzen was a friend, and Vico, too.

You say that all the best books seize us

half by chance, interrogate and turn us

loose upon ourselves again. I mostly listen,

letting what you say fill up the hour.

The room grows violet and dusky,

insubstantial, as your voice compels

and seems to quicken as your flesh dissolves.

And soon the darkness is itself complete,

consuming everything except your language,

which assumes an Old World gaiety and calm.

I feel, myself, an apparition.

“It is strange,” I say. “We find ourselves

alive without a reason, inarticulate

but always trying to re-form a thought

in words that never seem quite right.”

I see a flicker in your candle-eyes.

“The world is what it is,” you answer strictly,

having seen enough of it to say.

“The world is what you claim it is

as well: this dwindling light, the smoke

of reason, ghostly words in ghostlier air.”

I claim this hour, a plum-deep dusk,

the need to pose so many questions,

late, so late—an Oxford afternoon

when everything but language falls away

and words seem all the world we need.