Tag: repentance

Dayspring Mishandled – “Remember Not the Sins of My Youth”

“Dayspring Mishandled” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and is also a phrase in a pseudo-Chaucer poem (“Gertrude’s Prayer”) that Kipling wrote to go with that tale.  The first stanza of that poem is as follows:

That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

Dayspring is an old word for dawn, for the early part of the day, and Kipling’s point is that things we did, mistakes we made, in our early life cannot be corrected and may have consequences for the rest of our life.  This is both a fairly negative attitude and perhaps also a fairly true one.  How unfair it seems that decisions that we made when we were nineteen about marriage or education or conduct should have repercussions for the rest of our lives!  “Remember not the sins of my youth,” cries the 25th Psalm.  The Psalmist is talking to God, but he might as well have been talking to himself.  Who wouldn’t want to forget the transgressions of their youth?  Who can?

There are two kinds of “dayspring mishandled” that bother us, I think, as we look back from our old age.  First, we acknowledge missed chances, like not taking full advantage of our educational opportunities.  Regrets like these are ours alone, and we can usually remediate, atone, or come to peace in some way within ourselves.  Second, there is the guilt of doing things (or not doing them) that affect other people as well as ourselves.  This is a harder kind of remorse – even if we felt that we had no choice (if we wanted to survive) when we did whatever caused the pain.  Nevertheless, parents, children, spouses, friends – suffered.  I have always taken some solace from the words of Mary Oliver:

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.

Of course, Mary Oliver had no children.  Your children live longer than you do, and they never forget.

Literature has often addressed this idea of coming to terms with “dayspring mishandled;” one thinks of Oedipus the King or Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Of special interest in this regard are works written by older authors, who are looking back at a long past. I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, his last major work, written when he was seventy and about six years before his death.  It is all about the mistakes of youth – and how they can destroy the rest of life if left to fester.  Lord Claverton (the elder statesman) laments:

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,

I know this from experience.  When you reach your goal,

 Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,

 You will find your past failure waiting there to greet you.

And yet, Eliot gives us a relatively happy ending.  Old Lord Calverton ends up in a rest home full of people who know the secrets he has tried to keep hidden for so many years.  The secrets come out, the children forgive, and the old man dies in peace: “I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone;/In becoming no one, I begin to live. /It is worth dying, to find out what life is.”  I recommend The Elder Statesman; I think Eliot learned much between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and his last play.

We would like to forget our instances of dayspring mishandled, but we cannot.  Not only are the consequences very real, but as the wonderful Haruki Murakami says, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.” Ah, yes.  Not easy.  But is it at least worth hanging the dirty laundry on the line with the hope that, after all these years, sun and time will bleach out the stains?

Like all of us, I have my share of regrets, of daysprings mishandled.  Besides acceptance (easily said, nearly impossible to live), the thing that helps me is to remember that dayspring is something that happens every morning.  Each day we get a new chance and an older and wiser self with which to face the challenges and the gifts.

I am not going be specific about my regrets here. But I have often written fiction about people who are trying to realize the “ideal” of the poet James Fenton:

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

Since it is Lent, you might look at my story, “Shrove Tuesday.”

Auden, Narcissus, and the Duty of Happiness

I have gone back to reading Auden; this time I am reading his prose in The Dyer’s Hand.  He has much to say about life and old age, but I was particularly taken by this bit about Narcissus:

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his.   If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

We love our image because it is ours; we even correct it in our minds to be closer to what we think it should be.  I always think I look better in the mirror than I do in the cell phone pictures people take – I guess it is harder to mentally photoshop pixels than it is a face in the mirror (or in the mind).

Auden’s love for his own old body extended to his old age, even though he himself described his face as “a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain.”  It was his.  This comes across in his poem “A Lullaby,” written a year before he died.  Here he hugs himself, calls himself “Big Baby,” and references Narcissus again:

The old Greeks got it all wrong:

Narcissus is an oldie,

tamed by time, released at last

from lust for other bodies,

rational and reconciled.

For many years you envied

the hirsute, the he-man type.

No longer: now you fondle

your almost feminine flesh

with mettled satisfaction….

Harold Bloom loved this poem: “Older than Auden was [when he wrote the poem], I chant this lullaby to myself during sleepless nights and wish I had more of his admirable temperament.”

Bloom is right; Auden did have an “admirable temperament,” even in his old age (although Auden only lived to age sixty-six).  Like Spinoza, Auden thought we all have a duty to be cheerful, to be happy (again, from The Dyer’s Hand):

It is incorrect to say, as the Declaration of Independence says, that all men have a right to the pursuit of happiness.  All men have a right to avoid unnecessary pain if they can, and no man has a right to pleasure at the cost of another’s pain.  But happiness is not a right; it is a duty.  To the degree that we are unhappy, we are in sin.  (And vice versa.)  A duty cannot be pursued because its imperative applies to the present instant, not to some future date.

My duty toward God is to be happy; my duty towards my neighbor is to try my best to give him pleasure and alleviate his pain.  No human being can make another one happy.

Spinoza did not put it in religious terms; in his Ethics, he tried to reason his way through to a formula for the good life and says this: “Cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good; melancholy, on the other hand, is always evil.”  And Spinoza has no use for regrets, the one thing that often heads off happiness in old age: “Repentance is not a virtue… instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched.”

Auden quotes Caesare Paves on the definition of maturity: One ceases to be a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.  Auden does not think that it even does any good to tell ourselves about our trouble.  Love the old body, love the life you have had and have now, and do your duty to be happy.  So says Auden, but it is not easy.

However, there are moments, like the one my character has in “Snickerdoodles.”