In time-honored fashion, the paternal warning goes unheeded, with catastrophic result: Icarus flies near the sun, melts the wax that holds the wings to his body, crashes into the sea, and drowns. So Daedalus fashions wings for each of them and instructs the youth: Don’t fly too close to the sea, or to the sun. In this story of an unfortunate boy of Greek mythology, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, are stuck in Crete, on order of the king. In 1938, Wystan Hugh Auden visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, where his attention was caught by Peter Breughel the Elder’s painting of the Fall of Icarus. That’s why “Musee des Beaux Arts,” besides highlighting with supreme elegance an existential truth about suffering, is so powerful. Auden (1907 –1973) IT isn’t often that we can visualize almost exactly the way in which a poem came to be written. About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters how well they understood Its human position how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. How, I wonder, did they feel on learning about their unknowing proximity to tragedy occurring close by? The reality of intense suffering coexisting alongside the mundane inspired the poet W.H. Despite efforts to resuscitate him, he expired in hospital.Īs I picture it now, it was like a scene in a movie: While this longtime friend to many club members, seated at one end of the long room, was drawing his last breaths, people at the other end – there were perhaps 40 players sitting in pairs at small tables – went on placidly with their games, oblivious to the fact that their fellow member was playing out his endgame. That is, he didn’t exactly die he had a massive heart attack – apparently after putting down a bingo – and laid his head on the Scrabble board. It happened back when the club was meeting weekly at the International Cultural Center for Youth in Emek Refaim. AN unscheduled event at the Jerusalem Scrabble Club some two decades ago astonishes me still because of the way in which extreme suffering and “carrying on as usual” were, by simple circumstance, closely juxtaposed. We were, indeed, living in an abnormal reality. This was a period when the issue of how we react – how to react – while other people are suffering nearby intruded itself painfully often, without any satisfactory answer being provided. But, on the other hand, how in heaven’s name could one do anything as frivolous as shop for a new skirt while fellow Israelis were bleeding and dying? Either way, I felt weighed down with guilt. On the one hand, we needed to show “them,” and ourselves, that we could not easily be defeated, that we would carry on with our lives, regardless. I remember standing frozen in the store, unable to either carry on with what I was doing, or leave. (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) ` (script) Advertisement In My Own Write: Emotional overload - The Jerusalem Post
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