First, I offer you "Lot's Wife," a poem written by Anna Akhmatova in the early 1920s and translated from the Russian by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (and a tiny bit of Susan Jacoby).

"And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
`It's not too late, you can still look back.

`at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where you once sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage bed.'

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound...
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I will never forget her
who suffered death because she chose to turn."

Note that Akhmatova is rewriting the nasty story of a god who turned a woman into a pillar of salt for looking back upon her home. Instead, Akhmatova honors human love and longing.

Second, here is an excerpt from William Wordsworth's great ode, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," written in the early 18th century. Try the entire ode, you'll like it.

"O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thoughts of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest---
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:---
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have the power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never....

Wordsworth was only 34 when he wrote this. How did he manage it? I thought when I first read this ode that it must be a poem by an old man.

Finally, Neitzsche, from Tragic Philosophy in the Age of the Greeks:

"With thee, beloved voice, with thee, the last remembered breath of all human happiness, let me discourse, even if only for another hour. Because of thee, I delude myself as to my solitude and lie my way back to multiplicity and love, for my heart shies away from believing that love is dead. It cannot bear the icy shivers of loneliest solitude. It compels me to speak as though I were Two."

As the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (Anna Akhmatova's closest friend before he perished in the Gulag as punishment for composing an irreverent poem about Stalin) wrote, "I love this poor earth, for I have not seen another."

I know that many people derive comfort from the Bible's promises of eternal life. I derive comfort and inspiration from voices--these great, fallible human voices--raised in praise of mortal life.

The Book of Common Prayer concludes the marriage ceremony by expressing the hope "that ye may so live together in this life, that in the world to come ye may have life everlasting." The literature I love enjoins me to live this life, my one and only finite life, with the full awareness that its meaning lies only in what I leave on the earth. I do not fear deadlines that are truly deadlines.

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