The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rhyme and Rhythm vs. Meaning

As with poetry in translation, in life we can have aesthetic orderliness or we can have significance, but not both simultaneously. Finding the right mix is an awkward business; and the issue is never finally resolved. We commit ourselves imaginatively to contrary things: independence and stability; romance and monogamy; adventure and habit. But whatever commitments these are - to spouses, to jobs, to careers, to places, to interests, even commitments to oneself - they ultimately will breed familiarity, then routine, then boredom, then disgust, and end in abandonment, possibly murder. Or their consequences will be accepted as just and necessary compensation for a more orderly and predictable life, and simply endured.

Whatever choices we might think we make “They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death.” Whatever makes sense momentarily because of its poetic appeal may simply lose the meaning of our circumstances. “There are times when the order you have so carefully established seems suddenly unable to protect you from the darkness.” The unnamed protagonist understands the source of this darkness. “Darkness is a part of each one of us,” he says. It consists of wanting but not knowing what we want. And whatever it is we think we want will change. Hence “the absurdity of biographies.” Where can he go for advice but to Shakespeare, who knows every human feeling?

“Affection is a coal that must be cooled
Else, suffered, it will set the heart on fire.
The sea hath bounds, but deep desire hath none;
Therefore no marvel though thy hope be gone.”

There are few others who know how to compress rhyme, rhythm, and meaning so concisely, and with such durability.

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