More verse. More verse!

 More verse. More verse! 

Dear Ted,

I can tell you are sad - or I think you must be - when you don’t write back.

     Do you remember Leslie Becket (one t)? He was in your class, I think, or maybe one higher. Tall, gawky, British - I don’t know how he got to Brownsburg, where we were living then. His parents were killed in an accident or something, and his aunt was there, married to a professor at the college? If I knew, I don’t remember.

     I saw him the other day. He died in an accident, too, hit by a car when he was riding his bike. Not the car’s fault, he said. He was thinking about something else and swerved in front of it. He was always thinking of something else, he said. That’s the way I remember him, too, though, as I said, I don’t remember him well.

     I do remember that he read a lot. He’d go to the college library after school, get out a book from a shelf, sit on the floor, and read until closing. That’s what I heard anyway. Poetry. He read poetry. He’s the only one I know of, among all the people we went to school with, that did that. Except you sometimes. And me.

     He asked about you. People do, the ones I run into from those days. You seem to have been friends with a lot of them, not just your crowd if you had one. I missed that somehow, the how-many people you knew and knew you. I told him I thought you were sad.

     He said everyone was sad these days that had any sense. (That’s not the party line, incidentally.) But, he said, you should read more poetry. And he gave me this. “What a coincidence,” I said. “He (meaning you) is reading German.”

      Here it is. I was very careful in copying it out, so I’m almost positive I have it right. It’s by someone called Ludwig Börne, John Wesley says.

                                                Love, Moira*

„Nichts ist dauernd als der Wechsel; nichts beständig als der Tod. Jeder Schlag des Herzens schlägt uns eine Wunde, und das Leben wäre ein ewiges Verbluten, wen nicht die Dichtkunst wäre. Sie gewährt uns, was uns die Natur versagt, eine goldene Zeit, die nicht rostet, einen Fühling, der nicht abblüht, wolkenloses Glück und ewige Jugend.‟ ^†

05.17.20

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 * My sister, Moira. See here.

 ^† Romantic but true (though I might leave the last two phrases off): “Nothing is more enduring than change, nothing more constant than death. Every beat of our hearts causes a wound, and life is bleeding to death, if there were not poetry. It grants us what Nature denies us, a golden age that will not rust, a spring that will not fade, cloudless good fortune, everlasting youth.”