Lives in contrast

St Dominic. Saturday 8th August, 2020

Yesterday I wrote of the contrast between the lives of the people in Beirut and my life when going out to mow the lawn in the peace of a Scottish home on the Tay. Last night I had dreams of horrors which remain unfocused in my subconscious but with a mild frissance of dread, of something nasty having happened and still lingering.

It is a sunny day. For us in Tayside a sunny morning with a clear blue sky has been rare of late. I rose earlier than usual having first streamed Mass from Blackfriars in Oxford, the home of Dominicans. I know it quite well from my days at the University. They were celebrating the feast day of their Founder. His life reinforced my feeling of the good, the kind, the holy which has and does exist in the world, in many people and their lives and deeds.

The contrasts continue and probably ever will. Remembering that I mentioned Larkin's poem 'The Mower' yesterday I looked it up.

"Next morning I got up ( he had mown a hedgehog to death) and it did not

  The first day after a death, the new absence

  is always the same, we should be careful

of each other, we should be kind

  while there is still time."

Then as commended by a friend I turned to Norman McCaig's poem 'The red and the black':

" we sat up late, talking

Thinking of the screams of the tortured

And the last silence of starving children,

Seeing the faces of bigots and murderers

Then sleep

And there was morning, smiling

in the dance of everything. The collared doves

guzzled the Rowan berries and the sea

washed in, so gently, so tenderly..."

The contrasts of lives. The fates of peoples. I am struck dumb.