People
With the passing of Steve Irwin, my mind has been wandering today. His death seems like some kind of joke, random and pointless. And yet, when is death not some kind of universal joke: every fear, worry, love, attachment that person carried – gone. You could say ‘what’s the point of it all?’ but I think that’s the wrong question to ask. What’s the right question? I’m not convinced there is one. A certain poem kept surfacing in my head today – People, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (don’t ask me to pronounce that one, I haven’t a clue). It’s not the greatest poem out there, but the last line is particularly poignant.
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
