CONTINUING TO LIVE

Continuing to live--that is, repeat

A habit formed to get necessaries--

Is nearly always losing, or going without.

It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise--

Ah, if the game were poker, yes,

You might discard them, draw a full house!

But it's chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what

Your command is clear as a lading-list.

Anything else must not, for you, be thought

To exist.

And what's the profit? Only that, in time,

We half-identify the blind impress

All our behavings bear, may trace it home.

But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,

Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,

Since it applied only to one man once,

And that one dying.

Phillip Larkin-1973

Phillip Larkin died in 1985, and this uncollected poem was published in a tribute to him. It appeared shortly after I was diagnosed with cancer. Since that time, I have periodically revisited it.

In the last five and a half years I have probably viewed the poem in many different ways, but I have always felt the strength and honesty of the poem. What comes through is the struggle for meaning and clarity, and the admission that the meaning and clarity we find might be so personal as to be of no use to anyone, and by extension, I believe, perhaps a fool's paradise. Nevertheless, Larkin makes the struggle for that clarity noble, dignified, courageous. I have always said you play with the cards you are dealt with. Larkin's metaphor is better. You play with the chess men, and each day you play with less. I wonder, however, how Larkin would expect he could win. In chess, there are winners.

When Larkin says he has found his "command is clear as a lading list," he seems to suggest he has sorted it all out, as from time to time I have felt, but he later undercuts this confidence. "And what's the profit?" His insight might be a "blind impress" half identified.

So what is there left for us. Continue to live. It's a habit. I love that one. And continue to walk the length of our minds until that green evening comes. (Comments by submitter, David).