Real Life, Right Now, Is Parting

Across the street from Royal Albert Hall — On our way to Heathrow, we passed by the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, an expression of Queen Victoria’s inconsolable, decades-long grief for her consort, Prince Albert. Not even the greatest monarchs escape such partings.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I am, I suppose, in a melancholy mood. “All real life is meeting,” said the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. “Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung.” (Another way of rendering the German would be “All actual life is encounter.”)

This is true, I guess. And we can hope that, in the end, it’s ultimately and supremely true.

In the meanwhile, though, and pending that glorious day, real life is also parting.

My wife and I said a goodbye just a short while ago. This wasn’t precisely the trip to England that we had planned, or would have planned. But we loved it. And, along the way, I became well acquainted with “Peppa Pig.”

But now we move on. Real life is parting. And, astonishingly for a person with deep Scandinavian roots, I’m feeling quite teary-eyed.

Which put me in the mood for the poem “For the Fallen,” written about Great Britain’s dead in the First World War by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943):

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.

This poem is beloved in the British Isles. It’s often read at memorial services and commonly appears, especially its fourth stanza, on war memorial sculptures and plaques.

Sadly, when Laurence Binyon died in 1943, yet another generation of the youth of the United Kingdom were immersed in bloody conflict.

The off-shore geographical location of the British Isles didn’t, in the end, prevent them from being caught up in the two European-generated World Wars. Nearly 900,000 British people perished in the First World War, according to one source that I consulted (the numbers vary considerably); something like 450,000 died in the Second.

It’s impossible to calculate the loss, in beneficial medical breakthroughs, in scientific discoveries, in acts of service and kindness, in fathers and mothers, the pain to parents and siblings and spouses and children.

Real life is parting. Someday, though, it will be gloriously different.

Posted from London, England

Real life, right now, is parting