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estebanana -> RE: Mars, do we really need to go there? (Jan. 25 2025 19:31:48)
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My literature teacher was grizzled old ex journalist for a Boston newspaper. He’d spent his career in various countries on the foreign desks. He was a classics specialist, he knew the history of English literature well having attended, as he regularly reminded us, Brown University and London School of Economics for journalism. He was an American and very realistic, not pompous, but proud of his accomplishments at his schools.
His name was Bernard Mullins. He taught from the Norton anthology’s of poems and literature, plus Conrad and other novels, mainly because they were available at our school. He taught The Birches by Robert Frost one day. I told him I couldn’t really get my head round it, because I didn’t take his sort of hints at what the poem meant to him. Of course he wouldn’t say what he felt the poem meant to him because he wanted us to take it away and think about it. He didn’t want to hand out an obvious message. I think at the time I looked too deep into it and expected there could be layers of meaning embedded in it and I wasn’t understanding it. Now I’m not looking for a meaning, but when I watched The Expanse I recalled this poem and Bernie’s cryptic comments about it. He says to me, read the The Birches and think about the space race. Now that’s an obvious thing to say, I’ve heard many people commenting on the space program in relation to this poem, but it was written in 1915, less than a decade after the first flights at Kittyhawk.
It’s not changed, the relevance of the poem, birches still grow in places where the snow lasts until early spring. We’ve done crazy **** like go from a prototype airplane with lawnmower engine on a beach in south eastern US to creating the SR-71 and space reaching rockets and that’s all behind us by five decades. What does Elon know that I don’t know about life? Answer is, precious little.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust —
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows —
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
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