FEASTING ON THE AUTHENTIC LIFE

"Every man has his own destiny," wrote Henry Miller, "the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him."  Wise counsel, for sure, but it is seldom followed.  Many people, perhaps most people, are so conditioned by family, culture, and experience that they never discover their own destiny, and if they do, they usually lack the courage to follow it. More often than not, they end up leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation."

Consider the pathetic narrator of The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, the powerful poem by T.S. Eliot (left) on the horrors of the inauthentic life. Prufrock is a man who always needs "to prepare a face to meet the faces" that he meets; who always thinks he has "time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions;" who desperately wants to "disturb the universe," but, sadly, cannot muster the courage to do so.  He is a man who has measured out his life with coffee spoons; who feels that he is "pinned and wriggling on the wall;" who doesn't know how to "spit out all the butt-ends" of his days and ways.  

Dare to eat of peach?  Dare to part your hair from behind?  Dare "to force the moment to a crisis?"  Not Prufrock.  He can do none of these things, for he lost his authenticity long ago, and now thinks it might have been better if he had been "a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas."  His destiny unfulfilled, Prufrock is left with nothing but a sad admission:

 I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

If Eliot's Lovesong tells us about the tragedy of an inauthentic life, other poems point us to the joy that awaits those who have the courage to recapture their personal authenticity.  Two of my favorite poems in this regard are "The Journey," by the wonderful American poet, Mary Oliver, and "Love After Love," by the Caribbean poet, Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. When I begin to feel the slightest deviation from my own authenticity, I return to these two poems and always find inspiration.

Mary Oliver

The Journey

              One day you finally knew

              what you had to do, and began,

              though the voices around you

              kept shouting

              their bad advice --

              though the whole house

              began to tremble

              and you felt the old tug

              at your ankles.

              "Mend my life!"

              each voice cried.

              But you didn't stop.

              You knew what you had to do,

              though the wind pried

              with its stiff fingers

              at the very foundations,

              though their melancholy

              was terrible.

              It was already late

              enough, and the wild night,

              and the road full of fallen

              branches and stones.

              But little by little,

              as you left their voices behind,

              the stars began to burn

              through the sheets of clouds,

              and there was a new voice

              which you slowly
              recognized as your own,

              that kept you company

              as you strode deeper and deeper

              into the world,
              determined to do
              the only thing you could do --

              determined to save 

              the only life you could save.

                                   

Derek Walcott

                             Love After Love

    The time will come

    when, with elation

    you will greet yourself arriving

    at your own door, in your own mirror

    and each will smile at the other's welcome,

    and say, sit here.  Eat.

    You will love again the stranger who was your self.

    Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

    to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

    all your life, whom you ignored

    for another, who knows you by heart.

    Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

    the photographs, the desperate notes,

    peel your own image from the mirror.

    Sit.  Feast on your life.