New Spiritual Musing: "My Land of Lost Content"

My Land of Lost Content

          Today’s spiritual musing was inspired by a question that talk show host Charlie Rose asked the eminent Professor Harold Bloom: “What poem do you think will be in your heart when you draw your last breath?” And Professor Bloom replied by quoting (he has a “scandalous memory”) a little poem by A. E. Housman, “Into my heart on air that kills” — 

Into my heart on air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

“It’s an amazing little poem, but it’s astonishingly profound,” said Professor Bloom. “It covers the universal longing that we all have for the unlived life that is one of the four or five reasons for great literature.” And he went on to reference great works of literature like Don Quixote by Cervantes to illustrate a literary exploration of the unlived life (however fanciful it may be); but Professor Bloom got me thinking about my own life, and I asked myself the dreaded question: “What is my land of lost content?”

And I reflected, and reflected, and reflected…

I have many regrets for things I should have done, and could have done, and which always always always give rise to my deepest lament, my wish to have had a mentor to guide me in my life, someone who would have taken me aside and put me wise to the ways of the world; but I had no such mentor, and for every foolish mistake I made I paid dearly. This was my inspiration for my book of spiritual musings Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God.

But it was my lot to blaze my own trail, no doubt because the trail I had to blaze no one had blazed before me; and what mentor could have put me wise to that?

In Plato’s Apology Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and it could equally be said that the unlived life is a wasted life, and there was a time when I would have agreed with both of these points of view; but not today. Today I have a different perspective, and that’s what I’d like to explore in today’s spiritual musing…

After I got this musing started, to the point where I felt I could proceed without serious digging (because I had found my entry into the idea that inspired it), I drove into Midland to get my weekend Globe &Mail and National Post, and as serendipity would have it, I picked up the August 2017 issue of Harper’s Magazine which had an article by Helen Vendler (I’m currently reading her book on Emily Dickinson) that was titled, “American Expansion, The innovations of A. R. Ammons,” and she quoted  a poem by Ammons that spoke directly (will these coincidences never cease!) to today’s spiritual musing: —

Easter Morning

I have a life that did not become,

that turned aside and stopped,

astonished:

I hold it in me like a pregnancy or

on my lap as a child

not to grow or grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most

frequently return and return

to ask what is wrong, what was

wrong, to see it all by

the light of a different necessity

but the grave will not heal

and the child,

stirring, must share my grave

with me, an old man having

gotten by on what was left.

That’s what A. E. Housman’s little poem speaks to, “the land of lost content” that A R. Ammons calls a “pregnancy” and “lost child,” the unlived life; and even though I have many regrets for things I should and could have done, I did fulfill my soul’s longing for wholeness and completeness; but still, I have a melancholy feeling for my land of lost content, and even though I look back on my life now “by the light of a different necessity,” I cannot help but feel that I could have done more, so much more.

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