The Bells are Ringing in my Ears

Four-hundred years ago a poet wrote,

(1) No man is an island, entire of itself,

Four-hundred years later, social media has expanded communications networks, but

Many today live on desert isles of digital desolation, communicating

via snippets of text, laced with 👽s in this Brave New World

the viridian egg we used to call Mother Earth, the one who gave birth to us all,

Craving companionship, I am often by myself, even when I am with others,

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of main,

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

Still, we are lucky, we are going to Maui, An island

Scorched by fires fanned by man-caused global warming

Over Thanksgiving to celebrate my wife’s 65th birthday,

We will not make it to Pearl Harbor, but in the plane we will be thinking of

The eighteen-year-old cowboy on a destroyer to experience the squall and squalor of war,

Who built space rockets after the war at the “home” of Trinity Site,

The cosmos may be vast, but the human world is very small.

A philosopher wrote,

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” (2)

A novelist, almost killed by “friendly fire” during the firebombing of Dresden, disagreed:

Repeating the past is exactly what we humans do, he said, (3)

But the novelist probably agreed with the philosopher,

“Only the dead have seen the end of war,”

We are lucky, we have not yet seen the end of war…

As well as if a promontory were,

We will stand on Haleakalā, and though it be cloudy and misty, we will enjoy viewing

The disintegrated volcanic landscape, at 10,000+ feet, a frigid place of glittering icicles,

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were:

Then we will return, the Fates willing,

Back to a future that is both uncertain and certain,

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

Diminished yes, but also augmented by those who have

Walked with us along life’s path on this earthly island,

And, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tools, it tolls for thee.

And in some parts of the world, bells are still real bells, not “virtual” jingles,

And real bells, unlike virtual ones, do not come with whistles, they are just bells,

And in some places real clocks on real bell towers still ring the hours and say “tick…tock”

From now until the end of Time.

1. The lines in italics are taken from Donne, John. (1624). “Meditation XVII,” Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, www.online-literature.com/donne/409/, the prose poem which inspired Ernest Hemingway (1899—1961) to write For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Using a poem within a poem was inspired by “A Cento of Scientists” by Ursula K Le Guin (1929—2018) (https://reflections.yale.edu/article/crucified creation-green-faith-rising/poem-cento-scientists).

2. Jorge “George” Santayana (1862—1951), the Spanish-born Harvard philosophy professor whose students included WEB Dubois, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein. In 1912, he quit Harvard and took the Lusitania (sunk by Germany in 1915) to Europe, living the rest of his life in Rome.

3. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922—2007)