It’s one of the few movies I’ve
watched more than once. I’ve sat
through enough viewings to happily hum along with a comfortable familiarity,
but not too many that I can’t still be surprised when words
or nuances of the storyline I’d swear I never heard before come
brilliantly to life. We happened upon “Four
Weddings and a Funeral” on Starz Encore (a channel we
didn’t even know
we had) and sat fixated in a holiday haze watching Hugh Grant, once again, be the
bumbling, can’t get out of his own way, down on his luck yet
always manages to win the beautiful girl in the end with his English charm hero
he played to perfection in many movies of a similar genre two decades ago.
What was new to me this time through the movie reel was the poignant
recitation of a W.H. Auden poem, “Funeral
Blues”, by one
of the characters mourning the sudden death of his life partner. Hugh Grant and his close-knit gaggle of
loveable misfits walk away surprisingly struck by the depth of feelings this man
held for the deceased, so caught up in their own lovelornness they had hardly
noticed that two among them were practically married.
He was my
North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
--W.H.
Auden, excerpt from “Funeral Blues”
I caught a rerun of NPR’s Ted Radio
Hour this week; musician Sting talking about the writer’s block
he suffered at a low point during his magnificent career of one pop hit after
another. What finally broke it, he says,
was moving his focus away from himself and on to others. He made a conscious choice to stop trying to
write about himself, finding inspiration when he mustered the courage to look
to his roots and contemplate the so-called ordinary people he grew up with, a chapter
of his life he’d tried so feverishly to shake off in the
name of stardom. Twenty songs poured out
of him to make the Broadway show “The Last
Ship.”
A beautiful portrait of a long-lost friend on social media
with the hash tag #cancersucks stirs up a torrent of emotions inside
me. Among them, guilt for failing over the
last few years to pick up the thread of a lifeline I held to so tightly when she
and I were in the same place, in another time. “She didn’t need
you until now,” is his soothing refrain when I admit my
shame for letting her go, and my fervent desire to reconnect.
As 2019 comes to a close, every avenue of life is compiling little
vignettes bearing the impossible burden of tying all the year represents into a
nice neat bow to bring closure to what is, in reality, a mercifully fluid, open-ended
opportunity to fall down, dust ourselves off, and get back up again to start anew,
no matter what the date on the calendar says.
We don’t need to wait for January 1st for
our fresh start. We get one every time
we rub the sleep out of our eyes, blessed with the miracle of waking to another
dawn.
