After Long Silence

The Earth with the Moon and the Milky Way by Wladyslaw T. Benda
Produced to illustrate The Future of Earth by Maurice Maeterlinck

I've been absent from this blog for so long, and so preoccupied by events so complex and all-consuming that I don't even know where to start. But since one of my current adventures in rabbit-holery involves multiple space-related literary, visual, and journalistic media, I couldn't scrounge up an appropriate image from my own photo archives--so I turned to The Public Domain Review, looking for old photographs, paintings, or other illustrations that might evoke my current state of mind. The PDR seldom disappoints, and looking through images in the "Astronomy and Space" section of the image archive search engine I found several evocative candidates. I was quite tempted to use one of the illustrations by Henrique Alvin Corrêa of the 1906 french translation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, for a couple of reasons. One is my recent plunge into Mars-related science fiction (rereading Andy Weir's The Martian, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and related short stories, and beginning the fifth season of For All Mankind). And then there's my current anxiety about the state of the world as we know it.

But it's the all-encompassing import of this last category, coupled with the current flight of Artemis II to the moon, that led me to choose Wladyslaw Benda's evocative image* created for the publication of Maurice Maeterlinck's piece for the March 1918 issue of Cosmopolitan (!). I found a reprint of the essay in a rather wonderful blog called "Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age" by a Canadian chap named Cory Gross. [His last post was in 2023, so I need to look him up, but his blog seems like a Steampunker's dream site. One more rabbit hole!] The date of Maeterlinck's essay is important to the connection with war and its proximity. And the essay itself is particularly apt.

While I'm explaining myself, I should also mention that this post's title comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, which relates not to war but to age, which is more constant even than conflict is in my easily distracted mind these days. But the title's path to this post was less authentic than I make it sound. 

Over the last few months, spent recovering from a repair job on my sternum and raising a puppy acquired way too soon after the death of our beloved Nylah, I've felt guilty about not writing here, hoping that my remaining readers hadn't given me up for dead. And then I turned 78 (last December) and my son turned 50 (last month), and I finally twigged to the fact that tempus is fugiting faster than I'd realized, and decided to get serious about rejoining the blog-o-sphere. 

I actually did write a driblet in January, and have saved the draft, but I kept thinking about the title of a Sherri S. Tepper** science fiction novel called After Long Silence. I got it off the shelf and realized that the story had little to do with where my mind wanted to go, but I did decide to look up her title's source. And there it was: Yeats writing about age and speech and conversation, and this: "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young/We loved each other and were ignorant."

It's not that I think old people are smarter than young people. In fact, most of the young people I know (now in their thirties, forties, and even early fifties) are much smarter than I was at their ages. I used to joke that I didn't become an adult until I hit forty. But now, almost forty years later, I do feel wiser. And so I'll probably spend most of my future blogtime waxing philosophical about how much fun it is to be able to wander around in those rabbit holes*** making connections, remembering old things and discovering newer ones. Because we are, none of us, getting any younger--and some really ignorant and unwise people are making it less likely that we're going to get much older.

Time to get wiser and relish what time there is left. I'll certainly be curtailing my silences from now on.

Notes

*Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian (Flemish, but wrote in French) poet, playwright, essayist--and Nobel Prize laureate (1911, for literature). He wrote a play, The Bluebird (1908), that was translated into English in 1911; I read the kids' version The Blue Bird For Children, which may have been my mother's but is now lost to me. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, however, it's available at the link. 

**I read Tepper's Grass after I'd already become a devotee of Ursula K. Le Guin. At that point my sources for women's perspectives in science fiction broadened significantly. I didn't love everything she wrote, but some of her works are still among my favorites. She died in 2016, and I do miss her.

***If anyone's interested in what a real rabbit "hole" (they're really called "forms") looks like, here is one our puppy Alan found in our garden; we immediately protected the babies and they've since gone off to do adult bunny things. More about that saga next time.

The crown of a baby rabbit's head, framed by two tiny ears,
 is visible just below the top leaf.