In Blake’s penultimate illustration in this series Job is pictured with his daughters.... The sun is rising, trumpets are playing, all signifying redemption. Job became a fundamentally changed man after being tested to his core. He has accepted that life is unpredictable and loss is inevitable. Everything is temporary and the only constant, paradoxically, is this state of change.
September 23, 2020
"The sun is rising, trumpets are playing, all signifying redemption."
How happy I was to find only that when I searched for "trump" on the page "How Can We Bear This Much Loss?/In William Blake’s engravings for the Book of Job I found a powerful lesson about grief and attachment" by Amitha Kalaichandran (NYT).
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No one apparently has any perspective on life any longer. As of this morning, there have been 2,022,937 deaths in the US since the last week of December. There were 3 million who died last year....and the year before that. 3 million will die next year, and the year after that.
You mourn individuals. Mourning the deaths of the masses who died of COVID or cancer, for example, is just maudlin. 75 years from now, all of reading this blog right now will be dead. Our family's and friends that are still alive will mourn us (or most of us), but no else will or should.
life is unpredictable and loss is inevitable. Everything is temporary and the only constant, paradoxically, is this state of change.
Gee, ya think?
“ the only constant”
The constant is that every day is a new learning experience provided by a loving father and faithful brother. And he’ll get us through it.
Didn't click on the link, is this about Ginsburg?
This is beautiful, and just what I needed to read today. I share your happiness and not having politics intrude on a subject that is both much grander and more intimate.
This led me to the author's blog, which also led me to this very enjoyable snippet about Bill Haye's life with Sacks for the last several years of his life:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/bill-hayes-and-oliver-sacks-how-to-love-and-lose-one-of-the-world-s-smartest-men-1.3045231
He has accepted that life is unpredictable and loss is inevitable. Everything is temporary and the only constant, paradoxically, is this state of change.
That's what Amitha Kalaichandran understands the ending of the Book of Job to be about? Really?! Who knew that the Israelite Wisdom movement was so New Age-y?
"Okay, Amitha, just set the Bible down & walk away very slowly & no one will suffer a hermeneutic smackdown..."
I looked up Job...seems like he was a patient guy.
But what about Gob?
https://youtu.be/IvwyOrTB-rQ
I'm reluctant to write this for fear of triggering your instinctive aversion to anything Clinton or Obama these days, but when I read your post title, I thought you were going to riff on something from HRC in 2008 (I didn't remember HRC's exact words, which are admittedly not close to these but have the same vibe):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ia8I2jtfI
He has accepted that life is unpredictable and loss is inevitable. Everything is temporary and the only constant, paradoxically, is this state of change.
That's a quote to live by. accepted is the virtue that leads you to personal peace and serenity.
Our family's and friends that are still alive will mourn us (or most of us), but no else will or should.
I have lived long enough, involved in agriculture my entire life, to watch men working themselves literally, "to death" building a legacy, to see 30 years later, nobody remembers them. Except for those handful of family and the closest of friends.
Life is short. Too short, to waste it trying to impress people you barely know.
Thanks for this. What I remember most from a close reading of Job nearly forty years ago is how Job's friends were closer to vaudeville comedic tormentors.
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