On suffering

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W. H. Auden, in the second stanza of his “Musee des Beaux Arts,” refers to Pieter Brueghel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus to illustrate his insight into human suffering and death.

In the painting, Auden points to the farmer plowing his field and to ship (and its crew) turning away from the sight of a boy falling down from the sky and splashing into the water. For them, the sight may be quite extraordinary but not that significant to make them stop what they are doing. Even the fisherman, seen on the lower right of the painting, does not seem to be surprised by the sight. He does not even look at the boy falling into the water, and goes on with his fishing. And why would they?

Even the “sun shone / as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green / water”; but only because it HAD TO, and not because such human drama is worth its special attention. What may have happened to the boy would be the concern really of Icarus himself or his father Daedalus (or perhaps to high school students and their teachers who study the mythic tale in class for its lesson on overreaching).

But that is the nature of misfortune, right? It is earthshaking only to the people who suffers from it. The rest of humanity it seems could not care less. Or do they?

In transit

I went home for the holidays Friday, 21 December 2007.

But I was already on vacation mode a few days even before that, and so dawdling was the theme of the day I left Davao. I had put off packing until it was almost time to go. Instead, I chatted the hours away with Claire — talking about anything and everything. So it was no wonder that when I was finally looking for a cab, there was none in sight.

I stood by the curb, my big bag by my side, waiting for a cab to pass by. When I finally hailed an empty taxi passing by, the driver turned out to be not your typical Davao Formula 1 champion. Where other drivers would hurtle through the narrow highways of Davao, this one drove at a snail’s pace and followed every traffic sign and then some.

No discrimination

Heaven and earth conjoin and sweet dew falls,
nobody makes this happen
but it just falls equally on all.

(Image grabbed from logicfury.com/public)

Kind of gloomy if you look at it one way. But kind of liberating too, if you look at it another way. One way would be that this is all determined, and there is no grand puppeteer directing traffic — everything is just how it is, inexorably unfolding. And so, who knows where all things will lead to.

On the other hand, isn’t that exciting? When things come together and you don’t know how they will turn out.