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.