Anyhow in a corner.

Whenever death grazes the edges of my life, I think of Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

That "human position," the cataclysmically shocking and yet utterly natural event that is the cessation of a life, renders mortality a singularly unsettling notion. The poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts," describes a painting, Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," in which life in a seaside village proceeds as normal while the titular character, a mere pair of flailing legs, drowns almost unnoticed in the lower right-hand corner.

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Last week's devastating news threw these sentiments into sharp relief. An acquaintance returned home to find a loved one gone too soon; meanwhile, I rode my horse, unaware of the devastation unfolding a few miles away. Consumers consumed. Traffic lights changed. Cars zipped toward destinations. Some drivers may have passed the newly grieving house and questioned the presence of emergency vehicles before quickly reverting to their previous trains of thought.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The sun set that day and rose the next, as it had to. The world continues, as it has to. Now, however, more souls mourn and rage against yet another undeserved tragedy. When we ask why, life answers by simply providing us time to attempt to heal.

Though I feel uncomfortable revealing any details, I ask that those who read this post keep the bereaved in mind. Their situation is one no family should have to endure.