Our highest truths are but half truths;
Think not to settle down forever in any truth
Make use of it as a tent in which to spend a summer's night,
But build no house of it, or it will be your tomb.
When first you have an inkling of its insufficiency
and begin to descry a dim counterf-truth looming up beyond,
then weep not but give thanks;
It is the Lord's voice whispering
"Take up thy bed and walk"
It's far from great poetry (Arthur James, 1st Earl of Balfour....hmmmnnn....not someone I spent alot of time with during my Eng Lit days) but I do love the images of provisionality....and it helps to support my deeply held conviction that it's always best, as Oliver Cromwell so eloquently put it, to "Consider, in the bowels of Christ, that you may be wrong"
So there, Ruth Gledhill :-)
Lovely - or then again, from a rather better poet, though far less accessible or comforting...
ReplyDelete...love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance,
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and the places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
TS Eliot: Little Gidding
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/gidding.html
(can't do links here!)
R(er)ead the whole thing to counteract the nasty cloying sticky warm bath of Gledhill's church!