The Unbeatable Slow Machine

Philip Larkin is easy to despise.

He made a career out of whining about his career. Most of us would be thrilled to make a living writing poems about the dissatisfaction of writing poems and about how women (or men) just don't understand us. Most of us don't get awards and tenure and buckets of cash for our dissatifactions. We just get ulcers and divorces, while Larkin cashed in, and still complained.

It's enough to make you want to do that obnoxious violin thing with your thumb and forefinger.

Except, you know, he's brilliant. No one else quite captures how much an objectively good life can suck. How baffling it can be when nothing's gone wrong but yet nothing seems to be right. The unsettling feeling that life is living us. All the self-indulgent (and self-consciously guilty about it) miseries of happy lives.


His birthday was earlier this month. Happy Birthday, you crotchety dead S.O.B.

Here's a poem:

Ignorance

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.