Ian McDonald

Many people go to the ends of the earth to find beauty.

“The Voters’ Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Plotters’ Wit Shall lure it back to cancel the Result Nor all thy fraud and stall wash out a word of it.”

I have been re-reading a book of great beauty given to me as a gift by my wife: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Fitzroy Maclean.

A birthday – even an 87th birthday which is leaving it a bit late in the day – is a good time to see if there are any aspects of life which need some sort of reassessment.

For 30 years I have published a column in the Stabroek News every week.

My 87th Birthday has come and gone. I hear old Sam Beckett’s pessimistic shout: “We breathe, we change!

I once read a long article about two remarkable books: “The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford, and “The Early Poetic Manuscripts and Note-Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile,” published by Garland in New York.

I suppose it is getting older that brings this on but I have come to the conclusion in a long life that the high dramas of public events – the summits of great men who think they control events, the ribbon-cutting celebrations of immense enterprises, the coronations of Presidents and the inauguration of Parliaments, the inflated pageants of festivals and carnivals and celebrity occasions – fade into inconsequence compared with the quiet satisfactions of private life.

Staying at home and maintaining rigorous rules of isolation as one must in this time of plague – I find myself spending a lot more time in my library-study.

We are going through great traumas – a plague such as the world has not seen for a long time and, in Guyana, a blatant attempt to subvert democracy.

”Stay at home” is one of the protocols to follow in confronting the Corona virus plague. 

Readers may want to know why this space again this Sunday lacks its usual text.

It seems not a day, and certainly not a week, passes without our stomachs being turned by appalling news of women cruelly abused, beaten and, often enough, murdered in headline – hot, red blood.

I regret I cannot supply a column this week. It is late Friday after election day on Monday.

The great unabridged Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million words.

If I am allowed the time I hope to complete a book of portraits of places and people unforgotten and unforgettable in my life.

I remember long ago saying to that warm and intelligent human being, Winnie Gaskin, that I wasn’t really interested in politics, that I grew bored by its complexities, that I loathed its sour and unbrotherly antagonisms, that I had better things to do than get mixed up in all the unsavoury maneuverings that went into lusting after political power. 

Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth: “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”

I thank whatever Gods that be that even at the age of 86 my mind remains restless and eager to absorb new facts, new theories, new ways of looking at life and the world, new stories of mankind’s continual search for perfected knowledge, new illuminations of the spirit.

I love poetry. It is the quiet passion of my life.