This is so excellently imagined, Jeffrey. Sorry I'm late to it. As Kathleen said, you deftly weave your personal, literary, and cultural threads together, and with symbolic resonance. This kind of vision is so important because it's real, though most of us don't recognize it day to day in our lives. But these elements of existence are all there simultaneously, they do interact, and influence each other, as you show, and it needs the artist's vision to see through the three-dimensional screen that obscures that reality and reveal it.
The first time I was in Vietnam (fortunately, not during "The American War") our guide through the central part of the country was a man who worked regularly with American Vets to search out and recover bodies. One afternoon, he left our group to participate in the recovery of remains from a downed chopper in a lake.
More personally, I, too, was called home to my father's deathbed. I had arrived in Budapest just the day before, on my way to Transylvania and Ukraine, when my brother called. I flew back the next morning. I was lucky. My father was still alive. We got to speak one last time (he expressed regret at *ruining my trip*) and I was with him when he died.
I saw my first dead body when I was about 10 and a few more before, decades later, I was with the body of my mother, before my father -- the first time I witnessed the remains of someone I deeply loved. Each time, the jolting first response in me was recognition that the body is not the person.
Love this, Jeffrey - so personal and yet instructive as always.
I'm reminded of a show we watched awhile back: those African winds, the cause of so much grief, carry thousands of tons of sand and debris into the Atlantic every year, and provide vital nutrients to plankton and algae at the bottom of the food chain. Without those winds and their bounty, the ocean would be dead.
Such a lovely essay— both wide-ranging and soul-searching. I especially admire how the literary figures become ghostly characters alongside those familiar dead. It tightens the essay into a coherent whole and creates a broad canvas for you to explore. Thank you!
Jeffrey - I enjoyed this essay. I have not read the Aeneid although it is on my shelf to do so. I have the Fagles translation, not sure how it compares to Heaney's. Although I am unfamiliar with the reference text, many of the themes you discuss resonate with me. I have a box of letters from my grandparents and parents who wrote to me over the years that my Navy career took me to far flung ports. A few years ago when I happened to dock in Busan, South Korea I reread a letter from my grandfather who had docked there on a troop transport ship during the Korean War. Walking those streets and realizing he had been there 60 years before I felt a connection, a familiarity with him in a place far from either of our homes. The communal memories and connections that transcend both time and space. Virgil didn't know he would connect with you when he wrote those words. Neither did you parents know the legacy of their connection with you. But regardless, the connection is there and so in us the familiar dead remain.
What a beautiful and moving piece, Jeffrey. As a child I was lucky enough to be taken by my father to one of Heaney’s first public readings, which I’ve never forgotten. Years later he wrote a letter to my father, and that has been passed on to me. It’s a pretty ordinary letter but like the one from your mother, it’s precious.
A lovely braided essay. So many poignant echoes of the text with your own memories, and I agree with others who have responded to that arresting phrase, "the familiar dead." A fine example of defamiliarization!
My daughter is fond of Greek mythology, and I sometimes read to her from Edith Hamilton at bedtime. Last night we were reading the story of Atalanta, and I read Hamilton's note on the text, where she claims that Apollonius offered by far the most reliable portrait of Atalanta, especially compared to Ovid, who was prone to exaggeration. It reminded me that the timeless appeal of the classical tradition, which was once the very trunk of the humanities tree, lies in its power of suggestion. We now demand that literature represent our identities to the letter, but everyone studying Greek texts is dealing with fragments, translations, partial truths that the translator, like Hamilton, must synthesize into a retelling. As you do so wonderfully here.
Which is to say that the familiar dead aren't waiting for us fully formed. We have to fan them from their ashes, which smolder on in us.
I think this is wonderful. And poignant. And universal.
I have always loved the idea, the reality really, of plotting or referencing stages in life against poetry, or sometimes, prose. I think it is one of the most beautiful outcomes of reading…here the Aeneid with points and, above all, real people in your life. I think it does a whole range of things: helps us make sense, gives us language to hold on to guide us, gives us other people who have been in the same places before.
It is also one of the most beautiful outcomes of writing, and perhaps one of the most generous. Virgil didn’t know, at all, that he would be your particular guide here any more than he knew he would be So for Dante. He did, I’m sure, have an intimation of the universal application of his poetry to readers in a general sense and a hope that it would touch individuals both in the classical concept of education of the intellect and in the touching of the heart. But he wouldn’t have known that you, Jeffrey, would read him or experience moments your life through the prism of his shade. I think that is, in a way, a kind of miracle of creativity.
I found it a very exciting piece to read. Exciting because it touched my heart and my mind. Thank you so much.
I agree with everything Mary Roblyn said. The phrase “familiar dead” is moving by itself (so different from just “the dead”), and the weave of memories, books, and metaphors is *almost* enough to make an oracle of you. You give your parents a fine tribute.
This is a beautiful essay, Jeffrey. It is as deftly woven as a fine silk veil and evocative as twilight. You summon your familiar dead, and we recognize them as our own. You ferry us from Africa to Hanoi to Hong Kong to England; bury the dead and resurrect an old schoolmaster; hijack a taxi, and get home just before they lock you out. What a journey. Thank you for this extraordinary, haunting story.
So moving --with that touching opening and then the reading of Seamus Heaney and more. What a marvelous essay, Jeffrey. Thank you for joining me here as my guest.
Beautiful read of the interplay of living and the dead triggered no less by 2 books. Thank you! And who said literature was dead?:) Thank you for sharing. It’s my second read this morning on death and life and the fluidity between the two, and I am reading the Kathoupanishad: Dialogue with Death recommended by my spiritual leader…some coincidence or not.
This is so excellently imagined, Jeffrey. Sorry I'm late to it. As Kathleen said, you deftly weave your personal, literary, and cultural threads together, and with symbolic resonance. This kind of vision is so important because it's real, though most of us don't recognize it day to day in our lives. But these elements of existence are all there simultaneously, they do interact, and influence each other, as you show, and it needs the artist's vision to see through the three-dimensional screen that obscures that reality and reveal it.
The first time I was in Vietnam (fortunately, not during "The American War") our guide through the central part of the country was a man who worked regularly with American Vets to search out and recover bodies. One afternoon, he left our group to participate in the recovery of remains from a downed chopper in a lake.
More personally, I, too, was called home to my father's deathbed. I had arrived in Budapest just the day before, on my way to Transylvania and Ukraine, when my brother called. I flew back the next morning. I was lucky. My father was still alive. We got to speak one last time (he expressed regret at *ruining my trip*) and I was with him when he died.
I saw my first dead body when I was about 10 and a few more before, decades later, I was with the body of my mother, before my father -- the first time I witnessed the remains of someone I deeply loved. Each time, the jolting first response in me was recognition that the body is not the person.
Thanks for this.
Love this, Jeffrey - so personal and yet instructive as always.
I'm reminded of a show we watched awhile back: those African winds, the cause of so much grief, carry thousands of tons of sand and debris into the Atlantic every year, and provide vital nutrients to plankton and algae at the bottom of the food chain. Without those winds and their bounty, the ocean would be dead.
You never fail to blend the personal with the literary and place/culture so seamlessly, Jeffrey.
Such a lovely essay— both wide-ranging and soul-searching. I especially admire how the literary figures become ghostly characters alongside those familiar dead. It tightens the essay into a coherent whole and creates a broad canvas for you to explore. Thank you!
This is so layered and moving Jeffrey--thank you for sharing it, and how the dead continue to speak to us, in many, many different ways.
Jeffrey - I enjoyed this essay. I have not read the Aeneid although it is on my shelf to do so. I have the Fagles translation, not sure how it compares to Heaney's. Although I am unfamiliar with the reference text, many of the themes you discuss resonate with me. I have a box of letters from my grandparents and parents who wrote to me over the years that my Navy career took me to far flung ports. A few years ago when I happened to dock in Busan, South Korea I reread a letter from my grandfather who had docked there on a troop transport ship during the Korean War. Walking those streets and realizing he had been there 60 years before I felt a connection, a familiarity with him in a place far from either of our homes. The communal memories and connections that transcend both time and space. Virgil didn't know he would connect with you when he wrote those words. Neither did you parents know the legacy of their connection with you. But regardless, the connection is there and so in us the familiar dead remain.
What a beautiful and moving piece, Jeffrey. As a child I was lucky enough to be taken by my father to one of Heaney’s first public readings, which I’ve never forgotten. Years later he wrote a letter to my father, and that has been passed on to me. It’s a pretty ordinary letter but like the one from your mother, it’s precious.
A lovely braided essay. So many poignant echoes of the text with your own memories, and I agree with others who have responded to that arresting phrase, "the familiar dead." A fine example of defamiliarization!
My daughter is fond of Greek mythology, and I sometimes read to her from Edith Hamilton at bedtime. Last night we were reading the story of Atalanta, and I read Hamilton's note on the text, where she claims that Apollonius offered by far the most reliable portrait of Atalanta, especially compared to Ovid, who was prone to exaggeration. It reminded me that the timeless appeal of the classical tradition, which was once the very trunk of the humanities tree, lies in its power of suggestion. We now demand that literature represent our identities to the letter, but everyone studying Greek texts is dealing with fragments, translations, partial truths that the translator, like Hamilton, must synthesize into a retelling. As you do so wonderfully here.
Which is to say that the familiar dead aren't waiting for us fully formed. We have to fan them from their ashes, which smolder on in us.
I think this is wonderful. And poignant. And universal.
I have always loved the idea, the reality really, of plotting or referencing stages in life against poetry, or sometimes, prose. I think it is one of the most beautiful outcomes of reading…here the Aeneid with points and, above all, real people in your life. I think it does a whole range of things: helps us make sense, gives us language to hold on to guide us, gives us other people who have been in the same places before.
It is also one of the most beautiful outcomes of writing, and perhaps one of the most generous. Virgil didn’t know, at all, that he would be your particular guide here any more than he knew he would be So for Dante. He did, I’m sure, have an intimation of the universal application of his poetry to readers in a general sense and a hope that it would touch individuals both in the classical concept of education of the intellect and in the touching of the heart. But he wouldn’t have known that you, Jeffrey, would read him or experience moments your life through the prism of his shade. I think that is, in a way, a kind of miracle of creativity.
I found it a very exciting piece to read. Exciting because it touched my heart and my mind. Thank you so much.
I agree with everything Mary Roblyn said. The phrase “familiar dead” is moving by itself (so different from just “the dead”), and the weave of memories, books, and metaphors is *almost* enough to make an oracle of you. You give your parents a fine tribute.
This is a beautiful essay, Jeffrey. It is as deftly woven as a fine silk veil and evocative as twilight. You summon your familiar dead, and we recognize them as our own. You ferry us from Africa to Hanoi to Hong Kong to England; bury the dead and resurrect an old schoolmaster; hijack a taxi, and get home just before they lock you out. What a journey. Thank you for this extraordinary, haunting story.
So moving --with that touching opening and then the reading of Seamus Heaney and more. What a marvelous essay, Jeffrey. Thank you for joining me here as my guest.
Thank you for such a special read, Jeffrey. A wonderful meeting of literature and poignant memories of loved ones.
Delightful read.
The familiar dead. Wow!
Beautiful read of the interplay of living and the dead triggered no less by 2 books. Thank you! And who said literature was dead?:) Thank you for sharing. It’s my second read this morning on death and life and the fluidity between the two, and I am reading the Kathoupanishad: Dialogue with Death recommended by my spiritual leader…some coincidence or not.