I have a box of my father's letters
—letters that he sent to my mother in the two or three years before they were married (1947-49). They had met at the University of Texas—he was a senior, just back from fighting the Japanese, and she was a sophomore taking premed courses. The correspondence began after he graduated and started medical school at Tulane in New Orleans. My mother sent me this box a couple of years ago—I'm not sure why. Until today, I hadn't read a single one of them.
He died last month on November 22, a few days after I had helped move him to a nursing home. Two weeks earlier, he had had what the emergency room doctor, who called me at 2 am looking for a family member to notify, thought was a heart attack. The doctor couldn't give a definite diagnosis, since my father refused any further tests or treatment. He was taken back to his apartment, and I drove up a couple of days later and spent about a week with him. He needed help getting out of bed and getting to the bathroom. Once there, I would hold him to keep him from falling while he picked up one of several catheters that were lying on a paper towel, anoint it with lubricant—his hands working slowly, unsteadily—and insert it into his urethra, up the penis into the bladder. The urine that came out was dark yellow-brown and cloudy, but he was proud and gratified by it, and he asked me to record the volume. Then I would pull up his sagging briefs and help the bearded old man back to bed.
The letters are in a flimsy black and white shoebox with the word "Flings" printed on the top. I pick a letter out of the box and read it. Fifty-six years earlier, 24 years old and drunk on Leaves of Grass, he had written to his 19-year-old girlfriend:
I will not sing of Walt Whitman! I will sing of myself! Of the glorious joy and ecstasy that is bound up in all of life and in all matter! Of the whole scheme—how it hangs together on one thread—and how I grasp that thread into my understanding—into my consciousness. When a man faces himself alone, away from the sweat and press of things, he asks himself this question: Do I rate? .....and I say to this man, this animal, this group of mortal tissues, of atoms and reflexes and responses: YES! You rate and you will never die! You immortal soul!
I will tell you a secret known to no other living person, perhaps known by all, that I, Tom Brewer, lived before, many times before and one of those times I was known among my fellowmen as Walt Whitman and I wrote these words—and I write them forever and forever:
[there follows almost a full page of Walt, beginning,
Come up here, bard, bard,
Come up here, soul, soul,
Come up here, dear little child,
To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless light.
Father, what is that in the sky beckoning to me with long finger?
And what does it say to me all the while?
Nothing, my babe, you see in the sky,
And nothing at all to you it says—but look you, my babe,
Look at these dazzling things in the houses...]
I am going now to eat lunch—what joy there is in eating lunch—I feel the cold milk slip down my esophagus and I munch the juicy meat, flesh of animals like me, and I swallow the good vegetables cooked in water and salt and butter or other fat—I have all the fat and protein and carbohydrate and mineral and vitamins I need so I grow and stay alive and healthy—and across the sea—yes, not even across the sea, just a few blocks from where I eat and a few miles from everywhere on earth are people who can not eat what I eat because they are poor, or ignorant or both, or unhealthy so they can not eat—but I will not cry in my lunch for them—they hang on the same thread as I—I will eat with joy for them even while they starve and die with disease—yes, every man, woman and child dying of disease and malnourishment in the world today, I salute you from my healthy over-flowing table and I invite you to join me—as those souls slip from your tired and paining bodies—come gather around my body, you hungry, and be fed—come you who thirst, come to me and we will feel the cool milk, the life giving milk, the mothers' food for the child, we shall feel new and fresh life, cool, fresh life trickling down our esophaguses! Come, O come to my healthy, bloody body and be fed!
How long will this last, Nancy? This is the old "me" that you once knew—the inhibited, self-limited "me"—check that word "self-limited"—as I sit at this typewriter I no longer fear that my words will lose significance before they gain it—I know that what I write is important even if it's untrue. I can't answer the question because the new me is optimistic and says that the new spirit conceived in me by the holy ghost of Walt Whitman and countless unknowns like him will never die. I have a million things to write for you to think about: how we need to eliminate "Sundays" and localized (from the standpoint of time) vacations—we spend several days of the week looking forward to the rest and peace we're going to have then—I will make everyday Saturday afternoon or Sunday even when you're working it's still Sunday; I marvel at the great mass of "knowledge" that lies outside the minds of today's men—that will lie outside my mind when I die—I feel that different men from the men we know will find "God"—and even through the quest will you and I live and everything and we will see Walt Whitman and the wild, gentle laughter we will hear forever—can you hear it Nancy?!! Another thought: we come into life out of the cradle endlessly rocking—we accept a lot of the culture around us because that is the nature of our learning processes—we are trusting souls and we believe whatever the old wise ones around us tell us—we accept a basic pattern of thinking and living just because it was so taught to us—then we go to college some of us and we learn "science" and we become hard-boiled and will accept things only with sufficient proof—yet our whole basic pattern of thinking and living remains unchanged by the scientific spirit—we do not turn it in upon ourselves—our own attitudes and patterns remain "unscientifically" the same as our uneducated or "unscientific" society...let us reconstitute our frames of reference—let us reconstruct our lives to fit into our new way of thinking—for it is a new way of thinking; although it is old and eternal, it is new!
Another thought for you: Shakespeare wrote about the world being a stage and the men and women players—how strange that is, that thought, how it twists back—because what is a "stage" and what are "players"—they are methods used by the artist to explain to his fellowmen how the world is to him, perhaps in some cases how life and the world really is—that word "methods" isn't so good there but you see what I mean...the artist himself must climb upon the stage and play his part. But I see here meaning I had not seen before and that is this: artists of all varieties are those peculiar and different people for whom the great play is mystically staged—they are the only audience that we know...they do not take the play seriously in many respects—they sit and watch, some with joy and some with bitter scorn and satire—how different they are in fact, the true artists, and perhaps how scarce. They know that in the end each player must leave the stage, and most of them climb dutifully upon the stage themselves to play their roles—yet some few don't—those few are still there watching it all with shining eyes and wild, gentle laughter from ethereal larynxes...I see a man with a big bushy ethereal beard—he takes time out occasionally to make love to a passing angel—guess who? I have joined that audience, Nancy, please don't think I've cracked up under the strain—doctors often get mad at patients who have diseases which the doctors can't understand and which they can't explain—these people they dismiss often, saying, "It's all in your mind"—about people we can't understand we say "they are crazy" and we find this a convenient way to preserve our own ego and sanity—I have an ego now that feeds on no such food—I do not have to look down on any man who lives in order to feel that I am really worth something.
I love all of life and all of mankind and every individual—therefore I delight not in satire anymore—nor in ridicule—yet I love the satirist too. Laugh, Nancy, at the institutions, the small town habits of living and thinking, the religions—yes, I laugh at them too, but it is with the same wild, gentle laughter with which I laugh at you and at myself and at every immortal soul. This wild gentle laughter is the great compassion, Nancy, for the strugglings of life upon the face of this rock—each one is a "me"—each one wants to feel important and each in his own way wants to understand life, this great mystery, and he wants to live forever; if they could only know that in reality and truth they are immortal though they must die. Perhaps you can't understand this or feel it yet and yet I will laugh at you till you do. The shrewd sociologist, even the Christian one, must defecate in the same manner as the people who run the institutions he studies so objectively—I laugh at the satirist who sits there so seriously on his stool—I know so much more about him than he suspects—I watch his anal sphincter relax and I feel his usually pleasurable rectal spasm—let him ridicule "clubs" and religions, "local life"—let him castigate the immortal souls who have not yet learned of their immortality—but I with wild gentle laughter will hold him up before the eyes of the universe sitting there on his toilet. How many of the souls will laugh with me then!
Though I never publish a line of poetry for my fellows to read, I am a poet! Do you recognize that word, "poet", it comes to have a somewhat different meaning to me now—I have climbed down into the seats to watch the play, my soul climbs down that is, because I, myself, the "me" that stays on the bloody side of the silver mirror, this warm and tissuey me will play the role of "physician" and in the play I will be a good physician, because I am going to direct myself and prompt myself—that is the spiritual "me", the "me" that in reality and truth inhabits the spiritual side of the silver mirror, that eternal "me" that sits close here by Walt Whitman and laughs with him the wild gentle laughter, (long sentence), this "me" will ever encourage and prompt the worldly me—so that even the worldly me may learn the wild gentle laugh.
I walk under the trees between here and our classrooms and I hear the birds sing—and I sing and whistle and know that there is not one whit of difference between their singing and my singing, or the singing of any other living things. Listen some more to his laughter:
[here there is a quotation from Walt, beginning, "O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!]
Why did our parents not tell us of this great joy, Nancy, surely they must have felt it—why did they not recognize our yearnings and passions and congratulate us and themselves for breeding such lusty souls as we—for we are lusty souls—I have felt this "deliria" when lying with you, Nancy—it is over-powering and eternal and I glory in it—I have masturbated many times to obtain a relief of the passion that arises in me for female love but that is a lower joy and I reject it—because I know that you are the source of my life—that from between your legs my life will spring fresh again after I have worked and played between your legs...O joy O gay and glorious nakedness! We will find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
This Whitman lived before Freud—he lived during an age in America when sex was more tabooed than today—he was a pioneer of the spirit—without him how long would it take me to have enough courage to dare to think and write what I want to think and write about life—about sex. He writes this but I might have written it:
[more Walt, beginning, "A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking...]
Stay healthy and let your passion for me grow and I will indeed come to you and fill you up—and I will be loving to you always1 and patient and I will joke with you and tease you and make you cry out in wild joy—and we will live as poets forever!
We've finished pharmacology with a final exam yesterday and begin the new schedule you can observe on the one I sent you—I learn something worthwhile every day now. I love you—those eternal words! Tell your mama that I want to invite the whole wide world to our wedding—the billions, all those dead and who have yet to live included—and some young Jew to change the punch to wine. Thanks for the letter—it feels so good!
[the following is a fragment of a hymn by Arabella Katherine Hankey (1834-1911), the daughter of an English banker—she worked as a nurse, fell very ill, and wrote a long poem about Jesus, from which this hymn was taken]
I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love,
I love to tell the story because I know it's true;
It satisfies my longing like nothing else can do!
Oh! I love to tell the story—t'will be my theme and glory,
To tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love
Let a man know this: that he will die! The Spring comes out of Winter and the days get longer and a man will watch these days grow longer perhaps fifty more times. The earth spins around the sun perhaps fifty more times and this man dies—only fifty more! How many times have there been? How many times will there be? This man dies and his dust is washed by the under-ground streams, and his dust is blown by the above-ground winds toward the sea. What man can escape it? What man can build a bulwark against it? Time takes toll of tissues. Tissues tire. Tissues get angry at having to live and work so long; these angry tissues rebel—they go wild in their lust for death to form malignant tumors, cancers. Cancer means "crab" with claws. Cancer tears the life out of men. The smart doctors will cure cancer. Yes, man, they will find out why tissues want to die—perhaps they will cure cancer, but they will not save you! Your heart and its vessels tire much too quickly; even this heroic pump turns coward to rest forever.
You will die. Nothing can save you. Your eyes will rot and you will no longer see—for how can you "see" without eyes? The dust of your eyes will float upon the breezes—how then will you see, man? Only fifty more Springs for you! To watch the green buds come out of bare brown dried limbs—to see the glory of the sky—only fifty more times. And how many more movies to see? How many more books and magazines and newspapers to see? How many more ball games to watch? How many more kisses and naked embraces?
You will die, man! Let a man know this; that is his heritage. Lower animals don't know that they can die. Lower animals aren't afraid to die either. Why are you afraid, man? You, the most noble and intelligent of all the living creatures, why are you afraid to die? Why do you hide from it? Why do you speak of it in mournful whispers? Why do you sob? Why do you fill your life up with so many things to forget it?
Remember this, man, every waking hour; carry this in your mind and know this: that you must die soon! You will begin to live, man, knowing that you must die soon. Knowing that soon you will not be able to see, you will live with open eyes to see! While you live, man, go see all you can see of this earth—make haste for already you are half-blind.
Knowing this, man you will learn to love; the lower animals can't love because they do not know that they must die. Only if you know that you must die can you really love. You will love life. You will love other people by helping them to see what you can see. You will not worry for wealth or for power or for social standing. You will not spend your time manufacturing gadgets to kill time. You will work so that you can eat and sleep in health—then you will live as your main occupation. You will really live until you die. You will not seek to build for yourself and for your family a great mansion while the people on your earth are homeless and in hunger. You will know that your mansion will crumble in the dust, will mingle with your dust in the winds and in the sea. How can you kill a fellowman knowing that in a moment your dust will certainly be mingled with his! That is a truth, no matter your creed, that your dust will in a second or in a minute, scarcely in an hour, will be mingled with his in the wind and water of the earth.
Know this, man, understand this. Understand and know every day that you must die before the sun goes down! If you know this, how can you hate? If you understand this how certainly will you love.
Beyond the tired and angry tissues we know not what there is. There is no guarantee for any man that there are more tissues waiting, new eyes to see new glories. Some have faith that the new tissues actually are waiting there for the spirits of the tired tissues. Look around you, man, into the lives of these "faithful" ones; count on your solid right hand the number you know who actually believe it (you can tell these by the kind of lives they lead—by the things they do and say and write and sing—by the magnitude of things that worry them). There is no guarantee that you shall ever live again. You are sad, man, because you know in your mind that there is no guarantee. You need a faith and you can not find that faith. You are faithless today, man.
Here is your new faith, man! It is a faith in seeing with your eyes, a faith in living while your tissues bring you warm healthy life. It means dying, even in pain, with a smile of triumph, with a song of joy. It means a hearty laugh into the face of death. Know this, man, and know it every day! Let a man know this: that he will die—he needs no other faith.
March 15, 1949
1Sadly, not quite.
* * *
When I arrived at my father's apartment, the people in charge of his care—the doctor and the social worker—told me that he was declining very rapidly, and they expected him to die soon. During the five days that I took care of him, he seemed to stabilize, and even rally. He liked having his family around him—me, three of my younger half-siblings (Cornelia, Thomas, and Bruce), and his third wife Gail. One day, Gail cooked a "thanksgiving" dinner, and he gathered us around his bed and conducted a sort of symposium. He asked us to help him as he tried to reconstruct in his mind a sentence or idea that he had once read somewhere (his brain was working very slowly, and often he couldn't think of how to say something). Eventually he remembered this much of it: "The first task of the open mind is to ______ the obvious." We all tried to fill in the blank. Eventually we settled on "to question the obvious," and that partially satisfied him.
At first, we tried moving him to the house of a woman who earns money by caring for terminally ill people. I stayed with him there the first night, and then left him on the second. But the following morning the woman panicked because he had been uncooperative and refused to eat or drink, and she called an ambulance to take him to the emergency room. I found him there, and Thomas and Cornelia and I eventually got him moved to a nearby nursing home. It was then that I told him I had to go back to Virginia. He looked at me with a despairing face and said, "You're not going to help me pee anymore?" (By that time he was on a catheter, but nonetheless still wanted me to help him stand up to pee.) That was the last thing he said to me. When I came back to see him in the morning on my way out of town, he was asleep. He looked like a dying king—a big head, a white beard, disheveled gray locks. When people called the nursing home in the next few days, they were told that he was sleeping. I think his last words were spoken to Cornelia. As she played a Dylan song for him on the CD player, he said to her, "That's an old song."
He died last month on November 22, a few days after I had helped move him to a nursing home. Two weeks earlier, he had had what the emergency room doctor, who called me at 2 am looking for a family member to notify, thought was a heart attack. The doctor couldn't give a definite diagnosis, since my father refused any further tests or treatment. He was taken back to his apartment, and I drove up a couple of days later and spent about a week with him. He needed help getting out of bed and getting to the bathroom. Once there, I would hold him to keep him from falling while he picked up one of several catheters that were lying on a paper towel, anoint it with lubricant—his hands working slowly, unsteadily—and insert it into his urethra, up the penis into the bladder. The urine that came out was dark yellow-brown and cloudy, but he was proud and gratified by it, and he asked me to record the volume. Then I would pull up his sagging briefs and help the bearded old man back to bed.
The letters are in a flimsy black and white shoebox with the word "Flings" printed on the top. I pick a letter out of the box and read it. Fifty-six years earlier, 24 years old and drunk on Leaves of Grass, he had written to his 19-year-old girlfriend:
I will not sing of Walt Whitman! I will sing of myself! Of the glorious joy and ecstasy that is bound up in all of life and in all matter! Of the whole scheme—how it hangs together on one thread—and how I grasp that thread into my understanding—into my consciousness. When a man faces himself alone, away from the sweat and press of things, he asks himself this question: Do I rate? .....and I say to this man, this animal, this group of mortal tissues, of atoms and reflexes and responses: YES! You rate and you will never die! You immortal soul!
I will tell you a secret known to no other living person, perhaps known by all, that I, Tom Brewer, lived before, many times before and one of those times I was known among my fellowmen as Walt Whitman and I wrote these words—and I write them forever and forever:
[there follows almost a full page of Walt, beginning,
Come up here, bard, bard,
Come up here, soul, soul,
Come up here, dear little child,
To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless light.
Father, what is that in the sky beckoning to me with long finger?
And what does it say to me all the while?
Nothing, my babe, you see in the sky,
And nothing at all to you it says—but look you, my babe,
Look at these dazzling things in the houses...]
I am going now to eat lunch—what joy there is in eating lunch—I feel the cold milk slip down my esophagus and I munch the juicy meat, flesh of animals like me, and I swallow the good vegetables cooked in water and salt and butter or other fat—I have all the fat and protein and carbohydrate and mineral and vitamins I need so I grow and stay alive and healthy—and across the sea—yes, not even across the sea, just a few blocks from where I eat and a few miles from everywhere on earth are people who can not eat what I eat because they are poor, or ignorant or both, or unhealthy so they can not eat—but I will not cry in my lunch for them—they hang on the same thread as I—I will eat with joy for them even while they starve and die with disease—yes, every man, woman and child dying of disease and malnourishment in the world today, I salute you from my healthy over-flowing table and I invite you to join me—as those souls slip from your tired and paining bodies—come gather around my body, you hungry, and be fed—come you who thirst, come to me and we will feel the cool milk, the life giving milk, the mothers' food for the child, we shall feel new and fresh life, cool, fresh life trickling down our esophaguses! Come, O come to my healthy, bloody body and be fed!
How long will this last, Nancy? This is the old "me" that you once knew—the inhibited, self-limited "me"—check that word "self-limited"—as I sit at this typewriter I no longer fear that my words will lose significance before they gain it—I know that what I write is important even if it's untrue. I can't answer the question because the new me is optimistic and says that the new spirit conceived in me by the holy ghost of Walt Whitman and countless unknowns like him will never die. I have a million things to write for you to think about: how we need to eliminate "Sundays" and localized (from the standpoint of time) vacations—we spend several days of the week looking forward to the rest and peace we're going to have then—I will make everyday Saturday afternoon or Sunday even when you're working it's still Sunday; I marvel at the great mass of "knowledge" that lies outside the minds of today's men—that will lie outside my mind when I die—I feel that different men from the men we know will find "God"—and even through the quest will you and I live and everything and we will see Walt Whitman and the wild, gentle laughter we will hear forever—can you hear it Nancy?!! Another thought: we come into life out of the cradle endlessly rocking—we accept a lot of the culture around us because that is the nature of our learning processes—we are trusting souls and we believe whatever the old wise ones around us tell us—we accept a basic pattern of thinking and living just because it was so taught to us—then we go to college some of us and we learn "science" and we become hard-boiled and will accept things only with sufficient proof—yet our whole basic pattern of thinking and living remains unchanged by the scientific spirit—we do not turn it in upon ourselves—our own attitudes and patterns remain "unscientifically" the same as our uneducated or "unscientific" society...let us reconstitute our frames of reference—let us reconstruct our lives to fit into our new way of thinking—for it is a new way of thinking; although it is old and eternal, it is new!
Another thought for you: Shakespeare wrote about the world being a stage and the men and women players—how strange that is, that thought, how it twists back—because what is a "stage" and what are "players"—they are methods used by the artist to explain to his fellowmen how the world is to him, perhaps in some cases how life and the world really is—that word "methods" isn't so good there but you see what I mean...the artist himself must climb upon the stage and play his part. But I see here meaning I had not seen before and that is this: artists of all varieties are those peculiar and different people for whom the great play is mystically staged—they are the only audience that we know...they do not take the play seriously in many respects—they sit and watch, some with joy and some with bitter scorn and satire—how different they are in fact, the true artists, and perhaps how scarce. They know that in the end each player must leave the stage, and most of them climb dutifully upon the stage themselves to play their roles—yet some few don't—those few are still there watching it all with shining eyes and wild, gentle laughter from ethereal larynxes...I see a man with a big bushy ethereal beard—he takes time out occasionally to make love to a passing angel—guess who? I have joined that audience, Nancy, please don't think I've cracked up under the strain—doctors often get mad at patients who have diseases which the doctors can't understand and which they can't explain—these people they dismiss often, saying, "It's all in your mind"—about people we can't understand we say "they are crazy" and we find this a convenient way to preserve our own ego and sanity—I have an ego now that feeds on no such food—I do not have to look down on any man who lives in order to feel that I am really worth something.
I love all of life and all of mankind and every individual—therefore I delight not in satire anymore—nor in ridicule—yet I love the satirist too. Laugh, Nancy, at the institutions, the small town habits of living and thinking, the religions—yes, I laugh at them too, but it is with the same wild, gentle laughter with which I laugh at you and at myself and at every immortal soul. This wild gentle laughter is the great compassion, Nancy, for the strugglings of life upon the face of this rock—each one is a "me"—each one wants to feel important and each in his own way wants to understand life, this great mystery, and he wants to live forever; if they could only know that in reality and truth they are immortal though they must die. Perhaps you can't understand this or feel it yet and yet I will laugh at you till you do. The shrewd sociologist, even the Christian one, must defecate in the same manner as the people who run the institutions he studies so objectively—I laugh at the satirist who sits there so seriously on his stool—I know so much more about him than he suspects—I watch his anal sphincter relax and I feel his usually pleasurable rectal spasm—let him ridicule "clubs" and religions, "local life"—let him castigate the immortal souls who have not yet learned of their immortality—but I with wild gentle laughter will hold him up before the eyes of the universe sitting there on his toilet. How many of the souls will laugh with me then!
Though I never publish a line of poetry for my fellows to read, I am a poet! Do you recognize that word, "poet", it comes to have a somewhat different meaning to me now—I have climbed down into the seats to watch the play, my soul climbs down that is, because I, myself, the "me" that stays on the bloody side of the silver mirror, this warm and tissuey me will play the role of "physician" and in the play I will be a good physician, because I am going to direct myself and prompt myself—that is the spiritual "me", the "me" that in reality and truth inhabits the spiritual side of the silver mirror, that eternal "me" that sits close here by Walt Whitman and laughs with him the wild gentle laughter, (long sentence), this "me" will ever encourage and prompt the worldly me—so that even the worldly me may learn the wild gentle laugh.
I walk under the trees between here and our classrooms and I hear the birds sing—and I sing and whistle and know that there is not one whit of difference between their singing and my singing, or the singing of any other living things. Listen some more to his laughter:
[here there is a quotation from Walt, beginning, "O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!]
Why did our parents not tell us of this great joy, Nancy, surely they must have felt it—why did they not recognize our yearnings and passions and congratulate us and themselves for breeding such lusty souls as we—for we are lusty souls—I have felt this "deliria" when lying with you, Nancy—it is over-powering and eternal and I glory in it—I have masturbated many times to obtain a relief of the passion that arises in me for female love but that is a lower joy and I reject it—because I know that you are the source of my life—that from between your legs my life will spring fresh again after I have worked and played between your legs...O joy O gay and glorious nakedness! We will find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
This Whitman lived before Freud—he lived during an age in America when sex was more tabooed than today—he was a pioneer of the spirit—without him how long would it take me to have enough courage to dare to think and write what I want to think and write about life—about sex. He writes this but I might have written it:
[more Walt, beginning, "A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking...]
Stay healthy and let your passion for me grow and I will indeed come to you and fill you up—and I will be loving to you always1 and patient and I will joke with you and tease you and make you cry out in wild joy—and we will live as poets forever!
We've finished pharmacology with a final exam yesterday and begin the new schedule you can observe on the one I sent you—I learn something worthwhile every day now. I love you—those eternal words! Tell your mama that I want to invite the whole wide world to our wedding—the billions, all those dead and who have yet to live included—and some young Jew to change the punch to wine. Thanks for the letter—it feels so good!
[the following is a fragment of a hymn by Arabella Katherine Hankey (1834-1911), the daughter of an English banker—she worked as a nurse, fell very ill, and wrote a long poem about Jesus, from which this hymn was taken]
I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love,
I love to tell the story because I know it's true;
It satisfies my longing like nothing else can do!
Oh! I love to tell the story—t'will be my theme and glory,
To tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love
Let a man know this: that he will die! The Spring comes out of Winter and the days get longer and a man will watch these days grow longer perhaps fifty more times. The earth spins around the sun perhaps fifty more times and this man dies—only fifty more! How many times have there been? How many times will there be? This man dies and his dust is washed by the under-ground streams, and his dust is blown by the above-ground winds toward the sea. What man can escape it? What man can build a bulwark against it? Time takes toll of tissues. Tissues tire. Tissues get angry at having to live and work so long; these angry tissues rebel—they go wild in their lust for death to form malignant tumors, cancers. Cancer means "crab" with claws. Cancer tears the life out of men. The smart doctors will cure cancer. Yes, man, they will find out why tissues want to die—perhaps they will cure cancer, but they will not save you! Your heart and its vessels tire much too quickly; even this heroic pump turns coward to rest forever.
You will die. Nothing can save you. Your eyes will rot and you will no longer see—for how can you "see" without eyes? The dust of your eyes will float upon the breezes—how then will you see, man? Only fifty more Springs for you! To watch the green buds come out of bare brown dried limbs—to see the glory of the sky—only fifty more times. And how many more movies to see? How many more books and magazines and newspapers to see? How many more ball games to watch? How many more kisses and naked embraces?
You will die, man! Let a man know this; that is his heritage. Lower animals don't know that they can die. Lower animals aren't afraid to die either. Why are you afraid, man? You, the most noble and intelligent of all the living creatures, why are you afraid to die? Why do you hide from it? Why do you speak of it in mournful whispers? Why do you sob? Why do you fill your life up with so many things to forget it?
Remember this, man, every waking hour; carry this in your mind and know this: that you must die soon! You will begin to live, man, knowing that you must die soon. Knowing that soon you will not be able to see, you will live with open eyes to see! While you live, man, go see all you can see of this earth—make haste for already you are half-blind.
Knowing this, man you will learn to love; the lower animals can't love because they do not know that they must die. Only if you know that you must die can you really love. You will love life. You will love other people by helping them to see what you can see. You will not worry for wealth or for power or for social standing. You will not spend your time manufacturing gadgets to kill time. You will work so that you can eat and sleep in health—then you will live as your main occupation. You will really live until you die. You will not seek to build for yourself and for your family a great mansion while the people on your earth are homeless and in hunger. You will know that your mansion will crumble in the dust, will mingle with your dust in the winds and in the sea. How can you kill a fellowman knowing that in a moment your dust will certainly be mingled with his! That is a truth, no matter your creed, that your dust will in a second or in a minute, scarcely in an hour, will be mingled with his in the wind and water of the earth.
Know this, man, understand this. Understand and know every day that you must die before the sun goes down! If you know this, how can you hate? If you understand this how certainly will you love.
Beyond the tired and angry tissues we know not what there is. There is no guarantee for any man that there are more tissues waiting, new eyes to see new glories. Some have faith that the new tissues actually are waiting there for the spirits of the tired tissues. Look around you, man, into the lives of these "faithful" ones; count on your solid right hand the number you know who actually believe it (you can tell these by the kind of lives they lead—by the things they do and say and write and sing—by the magnitude of things that worry them). There is no guarantee that you shall ever live again. You are sad, man, because you know in your mind that there is no guarantee. You need a faith and you can not find that faith. You are faithless today, man.
Here is your new faith, man! It is a faith in seeing with your eyes, a faith in living while your tissues bring you warm healthy life. It means dying, even in pain, with a smile of triumph, with a song of joy. It means a hearty laugh into the face of death. Know this, man, and know it every day! Let a man know this: that he will die—he needs no other faith.
March 15, 1949
1Sadly, not quite.
When I arrived at my father's apartment, the people in charge of his care—the doctor and the social worker—told me that he was declining very rapidly, and they expected him to die soon. During the five days that I took care of him, he seemed to stabilize, and even rally. He liked having his family around him—me, three of my younger half-siblings (Cornelia, Thomas, and Bruce), and his third wife Gail. One day, Gail cooked a "thanksgiving" dinner, and he gathered us around his bed and conducted a sort of symposium. He asked us to help him as he tried to reconstruct in his mind a sentence or idea that he had once read somewhere (his brain was working very slowly, and often he couldn't think of how to say something). Eventually he remembered this much of it: "The first task of the open mind is to ______ the obvious." We all tried to fill in the blank. Eventually we settled on "to question the obvious," and that partially satisfied him.
At first, we tried moving him to the house of a woman who earns money by caring for terminally ill people. I stayed with him there the first night, and then left him on the second. But the following morning the woman panicked because he had been uncooperative and refused to eat or drink, and she called an ambulance to take him to the emergency room. I found him there, and Thomas and Cornelia and I eventually got him moved to a nearby nursing home. It was then that I told him I had to go back to Virginia. He looked at me with a despairing face and said, "You're not going to help me pee anymore?" (By that time he was on a catheter, but nonetheless still wanted me to help him stand up to pee.) That was the last thing he said to me. When I came back to see him in the morning on my way out of town, he was asleep. He looked like a dying king—a big head, a white beard, disheveled gray locks. When people called the nursing home in the next few days, they were told that he was sleeping. I think his last words were spoken to Cornelia. As she played a Dylan song for him on the CD player, he said to her, "That's an old song."
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