That Will Be Fine. I Think That Will Be Just Fine

Time stands still

And we and things go whizzing past it,

Queasy and lonely,

Wearing dogtags with scripture on them.

—James Galvin, “Two Horses and a Dog”

We’ll be all right if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.

—Robert Frost, from “It Bids Pretty Fair”

All day words were swirling, assembling themselves, unbidden, in inspired formations. It was a thing of real beauty, and I sprawled in the grass and watched them with wonder.

I let them go.

Time and again it occurred to me that I should make some effort to catch them, to capture them, that I should bestir myself and blast them from the sky; that I should gather them up and soak them in some preservative and pin them to something for permanent display.

But I did not stir.

I watched them gradually dissolve and disappear and fade away into the clouds and into the distance and, eventually, into the falling darkness. There would, I felt sure, be more where those came from. I always feel certain there will be more where those came from, even as, still, I have absolutely no idea where those, where they, where any of them come from, or where they go when they flee.

I get to the bottom of the day and sit here listening to the trilling of the dying cicadas as autumn advances resolutely on the city; and suddenly I find myself thinking that perhaps, after all, there are not, or there will not be, more words where those came from, even as they keep coming, ever more slowly now, exhausted, diminished and disconsolate as the dying cicadas.

One day certainly they will disappear for good, they will stop coming finally and forever, and then there will be only silence and a vast sky empty except for the sun.

That will be fine.

I think that will be just fine.

Words are not people.

—Paul Klee, Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”