Quote of the Day (Thomas Gray, on the “Inevitable Hour” of the Grave)

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”—Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)

The English poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771) published this, probably the most famous elegy in the English language, anonymously 260 years ago this week. He had been mulling it perhaps for as much as eight years. 

Then, even after completing it in 1750, Gray circulated it among friends for another year before the editor of one cheap periodical, having gotten his hands on it in the meantime and saying he would print it (as it happened, with errors), forced the author to put it into the hands of the more prestigious publisher Dodsley. But for that first hack, Gray—who only published a handful of poems in his lifetime—might have ended up like the “mute inglorious Milton” he memorialized here.

Multiple phrases from this poem have continued to be quoted years after its first appearance, but the last line in the above quote is really the heart of the work. I’ve had occasion to ponder it more and more recently, having watched one relative after another (including my mother this past fall) pass away.

Gray is almost brutally egalitarian here: all the distinctions of wealth and fame count for nothing in the face of death. And yet, I’m of the opinion that brutality is only part of what happens at this point, that a life well-lived will also bring a more glorious immortality in the resurrection.

(The portrait of Gray here, by the way, is by John Giles Eccart, painted a few years before the appearance of the poem.)

Song Lyric of the Day (George Harrison, on Why “This Grey” Will Pass)

“Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It's not always going to be this grey
All things must pass, all things must pass away.”—George Harrison, “All Things Must Pass,” from his All Things Must Pass LP (1970)

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the release of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. If “the quiet Beatle” wanted to be noticed, after half a dozen years of standing in the shadow of bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he couldn’t have picked a more spectacular way of doing so than with this, the world’s first triple album.

The size of this song package surprised everyone, but it shouldn’t have. Lennon and McCartney were such intense rivals that Harrison could get, at most, only two of his compositions onto a single Fab Four album.

In the couple of years before the release of All Things Must Pass, Harrison began to chafe at these creative constraints. Not only were most of his compositions rejected by Lennon and McCartney (ironically so, given that two of the Beatles' best later songs, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something," were written by him), but the control-freak McCartney also limited Harrison's guitar contributions in the studio, leading “the quiet one” to quit the group for a short while. (By the time he rejoined, of course, the tensions between McCartney and Lennon that finally rent the Fab Four asunder had replaced the McCartney-Harrison faceoff as the principal focus of intragroup unease.)

Was all the material that Harrison mined for this epic work consistently good? Not anymore than another triple album a decade later, by an artist who loved one of his late Beatles songs (“Something”) so much that he covered it himself: Frank Sinatra, whose Trilogy was rightly judged by deejay Jonathan Schwartz as two-thirds amazing and one-third--well, never mind.

But in sheer ambition—something that late Sixties and Seventies rock ‘n’ roll certainly didn’t lack—nothing could top All Things Must Pass, and it was amply rewarded at the cash register. For the first half of the Seventies, you really couldn’t listen to any album-oriented rock programming without hearing one of its tracks--not merely the hits “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life”, but deeper cuts like “Apple Scruffs,” “Isn’t It a Pity,” “Awaiting on You All,” “Wah-Wah,” “If Not for You,” or the title track.

Heavily colored by Harrison’s belief in Hinduism (he’d persuaded the other Beatles to journey to India to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi), the album cried out for otherworldly musical textures. He found these with the help of producer Phil Spector, whose career, before his association with the Beatles on the chaotic “Let It Be” sessions, earned from Tom Wolfe the moniker “The First Tycoon of Teen.” Spector’s style came to be called “the wall of sound,” but in size and the urge to overcome all limits, it might just as easily have been called “the galaxy of sound.” Now Harrison provided him themes commensurate with his Wagnerian aims.

It was inevitable, given the Beatles’ recent breakup, that the title tune would be read by some as an oblique commentary on the end of the great musical partnership of the Sixties. Harrison’s own religious beliefs provide an alternative reading: as acceptance of the universe born out of resignation over the transitory nature of human reality.

But it is also possible to see the song, like two others released that year--The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”--as offers of emotional consolation, outgrowths of a time in which, for Harrison, McCartney and Paul Simon, turbulence with musical partners matched disruption in the larger world. All three songs feel like hymns.

Recent events in my life have led me to see “Let It Be” and “All Things Must Pass,” at some level, as also relating to mortality. McCartney, who lost his mother to cancer as a teenager (a point of emotional connection with Lennon, who also lost his mother in the same period), explicitly notes in "Let It Be" that in “times of trouble,” “Mother Mary comes to me.”

Several days ago, after not having heard “All Things Must Pass” in awhile, I listened to it again, with initial foreboding over whether it would depress me as a reminder of my own recent loss. I was surprised not only that this did not occur, but that I felt uplifted by the closing chords of the song.

Loss does come, Harrison reminds us, but it’s as inevitable as natural events. Death and even love (the singer’s wife Patti had plunged into an affair with friend Eric Clapton that would eventually doom their marriage) might appear, but the darkness of grief--“this grey“--will not linger for good.

Harrison was only in his late twenties when he wrote this, and from all accounts I’ve read, the sense of spiritual peace he expressed on this song and throughout the rest of this album--the bestselling solo work, incidentally, by any of the Beatles--served him in good stead three decades later, when he was dying of cancer.

Quote of the Day (Richard John Neuhaus, on Death)

“The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it.” –Richard John Neuhaus, “Born Toward Dying,” in The Best Spiritual Writing 2000, edited by Philip Zaleski (2000)

Maybe it was because I found this essay while searching in the same volume for another poem by John Updike, or maybe it was because so many loved ones and friends recently have been either dying or experiencing debilitating illnesses. But the essay in which I found the above quote from Richard John Neuhaus, who died on January 8, hit me with particular force.

For more than four decades, Fr. Neuhaus engaged passionately in this nation’s political-religious dialogue. Beginning his career as a Lutheran minister who was among the civil-rights marchers at Selma, he later converted to Roman Catholicism and outraged many of his former colleagues by denouncing abortion as fervently as he once had segregation and voting-rights abuses.

Neuhaus did not see his former and current stances as contradictory, and neither do I—though I take issue with a number of aspects of his thought--quite a few, actually--in his later years, including, but hardly limited to, his question, “Is Mormonism Christian?” (His answer: no, though Mormons remain entitled to “respect for their human dignity, protection of their religious freedom, readiness for friendship, openness to honest dialogue, and an eagerness to join hands in social and cultural tasks that advance the common good.” I can just picture their response after reading the rest of the piece—“Thanks a lot, Father.”)

The column that Fr. Neuhaus wrote for the journal he founded, First Things, was called “The Naked Public Square,” taking its name from a 1984 book of his. The column was, in effect, a print prototype for a religion blog, in which he advanced the point that secularism drives the religiously minded out of the national political debate at its own peril.

A couple of years ago, I was startled to read that this priest, so often associated with neo-conservatism, had been preaching at the 5 pm Mass on Sundays at my alma mater, Columbia University. From this fascinating article on the nature of his intellectual thought, evidently written a few years ago, I discovered that Fr. Neuhaus was not assigned full-time to the campus, but rather came up there from his regular parish down by 14th Street to preach on Sunday.

An article from Commonweal Magazine from a couple of years ago indicated that the arrangements with Fr. Neuhaus resulted from a desire by Edward Cardinal Egan for a more conservative ministry on the campus. I’m sure that the appointment probably went over like a lead balloon with a large portion of the Catholic community on Morningside Heights. During my time at the school, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Fr. Neuhaus’ orthodoxy would not have been widely embraced by a Catholic student body and faculty that, like the rest of the school, tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in thought.

I hope that Fr. Neuhaus and the students to whom he preached didn’t talk past each other. An honorable religious tradition, extending from Jeremiah to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., consists in telling people what they’d rather not hear. The human temptation is to find safety in numbers.

When people begin to wander off the ideological reservation, whether in religion or politics—but especially where the two realms intersect—it’s frightening to find oneself out there alone. What do you do then—softpedal concerns that might outrage people who’ve meant much to you for a long time, or embrace everyone who embraces you, even though you might have serious qualms about their positions or character?

Neither choice, it seems to me, is particularly fruitful. It doesn’t really leave you open to thoughts that demand to be heard and acknowledged. Dialogue within religions as well as between religions need to be conducted in tones of respect as much as challenge.

In that spirit, I urge you to find Fr. Neuhaus’ essay “Born Toward Dying” and read it. What begins as an objective if tough-minded cultural survey of “going through the experience” of death has been earned, one discovers in the grueling autobiographical part of the piece, under the most grueling of circumstances: Fr. Neuhaus had his own near-death experience starting in 1993. No matter what your feelings about his religious orthodoxy or political stances, I think you’ll find his reflections in this case not just erudite and provocative, as with so much of his other work, but moving and profound.

Fr. Neuhaus’ cancer had been in remission before his final, fatal encounter a few weeks ago. How was he changed by his initial battle with death? What did he learn? Hopefully that, at the end, we are not defined before God by labels—liberal or conservative, Catholic or non-Catholic, etc.—but that, no matter what your station in life, as the poet Thomas Gray once put it, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Even in death, Fr. Neuhaus will be contributing to the spirited religious discussion in this country with a posthumously published book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, which is supposed to discuss the religious/spiritual aspects of American democracy.

Requiescat in pacem, Fr. Neuhaus.