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FIFTY-SIX

Professor Marcie Frank has flattered me by a comparison to Pope. So, in ending, let me quote the last lines of the Dunciad, lines that I learned, voluntarily, as a schoolboy:

Nor public flame nor private, dares to shine;

Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!

Lo! thy dread empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;

Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,

And universal Darkness buries all.

In 1943 when I recited this to a classmate at the Phillips Exeter Academy, he was bewildered. “Why did you learn that?” he asked. “Because,” I said, “it’s bound to be apt one of these days.” And so it is today, January 1, 2006.

Much time over thirty years was spent on the balcony overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ulysses, more than usually off course, was believed to have sailed…well, rowed on the scenic route back home to Ithaca. Several miles to the back of my head are the temples of Paestum.