View from the Precipice
April 2025
Every month Professor Sympos offers another view from the clifftop of septuagenarian and Anthropocene existence. He is not long for this life, and neither, apparently, is anyone who might survive him, whatever their age.
Before he died, Moses had his "Pisgah moment," beholding, from the mountain-top of that name, the Promised Land--a land he would never enter. What Professor Sympos beholds isn't the land he was promised, but he's not too worried: from what he can see of it, he's not sure he'll be missing much.
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With nowhere to go but over the edge, Professor Sympos finds much to distract him here: a hawk soaring by, the bluettes at his feet. A gnarled pine hanging on. Scat. He'll let you know.
He can also, from the escarpment he's arrived at, look back at the dark valleys from which he and his antecedents emerged. Hindsight is not wisdom, but he cannot help feeling, comparatively speaking, enlightened.
A Terrible Beauty
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All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
“Easter, 1916,”
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
“The Second Coming"
My epigraphs this month are the concluding lines of two poems that the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote just three years apart. The first, “Easter, 1916,” was begun in May of that year, almost immediately after British authorities executed the leaders of the Irish uprising that had taken place in Dublin the month before, on Easter Monday. Yeats, an Irish nationalist, had renounced violence in the pursuit of independence. The executions shocked him and changed him. He never took up arms himself, but he now understood better those who did, and felt inspired by their example.
The uprising, though unsuccessful, was the spark that lit the fuse for the Irish War of Independence from Great Britain, which began fourteen months after the armistice of November 11, 1918, marking the end of World War I. Two years later, in 1921, the Irish Free State was born, and a year after that Yeats agreed to serve as one of its first senators.
In those same fourteen months, however, Yeats wrote “The Second Coming.” The terrible beauty of self-immolation for a noble cause had been swallowed up, in his mind, by the rough beast of senseless, mechanized slaughter and mass destruction on a scale previously unimaginable. The two years spanning February 1918 to April 1919 also saw the outbreak of the Spanish Influenza pandemic, which almost killed the poet’s pregnant wife, Georgie, and their unborn child.
Given the course of human history in the century and more since Yeats wrote these two poems, it’s safe to say that his rough beast has not only been born, but born again and again and again, in a series of incarnations that appears to have no end. And each time, a terrible beauty has been born to oppose it, almost like a fraternal or sororal twin: in the face of Spanish Fascism, the Lincoln Brigade; of Nazi genocide, the Warsaw Uprising; of Russian invasion, hundreds of anonymous Ukrainian partisans.
And I’m not talking only about the terrible beauty of armed resistance. The Suffragettes, Mahatma Ghandi leading the Salt March, Martin Luther King at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, “Tank Man” in Tiananmen Square. All these beautiful profiles in courage arose in response to one or another incarnation of Yeats’s perpetual menace.
Since January 6th, we have had our own rough beast to face down. He has orange hair, like a lion, but he’s really more like Bert Lahr.
If only he were as funny.
Three days from now, on April 5th, the citizens of this nation, not just in its capital on the Potomac but in cities and towns from Boston to Honolulu, will have their chance to roar.
I urge you to join them.
I’m waiting for your terrible beauty to be born.