RJM Corbet
Deus Pascus Corvus
From the Diary of Hamish El Tyrone:
The labyrinth of days. How to fill the time? An old man spaces his actions carefully. The worst threat to an old man’s wellbeing becomes his own mind. It can easily lead him into melancholy depression, painfully allayed to the guilt of knowing that he has little to complain about really. I have food. I have a home. I have my health. For all of which I’m truly grateful. I thank God everyday. But still I feel abandoned, useless, like an old horse put out to grass. There’s no use trying to understand. I know nothing, just that an old man’s life is measured in fractions of the day. I don’t even try to understand anymore.
Young people try to understand. The old man knows that there can never be any real understanding of any truth that man can really ever know. Truth recedes, like the end of a rainbow. The truth will always reveal itself deeper and more complex, so what point searching?
I woke this morning with some thought I needed to write down. It was just one sentence. But it was too cold to get up and so I didn’t record it. Now it’s forgotten. I wake like a captive bird from freedom dreams of wings and sunshine, to the hopeless world of conscious thought. No shaft of sun, no ray of light, reaches the cage that shelters and protects me, while at the same time it denies me freedom and purpose of living. There is great sadness in my heart.
This depression is always with me, worst always in the morning. It’s my old companion. Another day stretches ahead. How to pass the long hours between now until nightfall, when I can sleep and dream again? So I fill pages with words. I don’t think about tomorrow. I don’t even think about the rest of today. The sky is cold.
I just have to get through the day that stretches ahead of me, the empty desert of hours. I only have to survive till nightfall. Night is my destination. The night is my friend. The night makes no demands. Nothing physical can satisfy me now: no food or drink, no woman’s kiss, no book or music. The cheeky, squawking gulls wake thin, hard wings into the wind: twisting, crying, fishing off the gale. Gulls, white as froth blown off the sea.
There is no sunlight through my window. Just grey. Everything seems pointless to me. There’s always a hollow darkness inside me now. I hear voices outside my window, the sounds of traffic starting on the road, the clank of chains, the clatter of wheels and axles, the clopping sound of the horses hooves, straining up the hill. Another day begins. My heart is breaking. It’s still early morning, I write these words, sitting here at the table that I made myself. This house has become for me a prison.
Sometimes, when it’s not raining, I make a sandwich and take a backpack and walk up on the mountains. I spend whole days up there in summer beneath big leafy trees and beside small streams that tumble cold and clear and fast over ancient stones. I thank God always for my legs. Life is a fragile thing, is it not?
I owe so much to Clarissa. She is no longer in this world, but always close to me in spirit. She does not judge me. Without her I think I would just dig a hole for myself and die in it. But, as she used to say: we must always try to remind ourselves of where right prevails over wrong, to create the right intention and to see in entirety.
Wisdom is in the will to bestow.
There is no yesterday or tomorrow in this place, no morning and no afternoon. Expectation leads to certain disappointment. Expect nothing. That’s the first rule. I have only my words today.
Leave the why to greater ones. My mind swings like a pendulum. I deal with each day, hour by hour. Small things become important. I am careful always. The mornings are not good for me, in this grey, lonely place. I want nothing more of this world but that it should let me go. Oh, Holy Eloih, take away this grief. Put a stamp upon it. Mark it with a sign of death and pain, and scythe it away. I cannot do it alone. You are all powerful. But when you speak, yours is a small, still voice. You who created the world and all the universe. You care nothing for appearances. I know I have no human wisdom. I know I am alone.
The mountains surround me, here in the village where I live. Outside my window fallen leaves blow and scurry in eddies, scraping upon the black paved road, outside a yellow door. The leaves are gold and red and brown. They seem to glow from within with warmth of colour against the grey and black of approaching winter. Carriages rush past my window outside in the street. The leaves scrape and scurry. In here, it’s just me. Just me. The clock ticks.
I wash my clothes in the bathtub, and hang them outside under the cold grey sky to drip for a while. They won’t ever dry properly there, but later I’ll bring them inside again to dry properly over the heater in the main room. I smoke my pipe outside on the paved courtyard, where the trees have lost their leaves, and then I bang the ashes out against the grey stone wall and return inside, spacing my movements.
The morning’s nearly gone now. It’s nearly noon. The afternoon stretches ahead. When it gets dark I’ll warm the rest of the broth I made yesterday, and eat it, and then go to bed, with a book, knowing that the day is over and that I own the equalizing night, as rightfully as any man; all men are equal in sleep.
I make a sandwich in my small kitchen and chew it carefully, with little enjoyment, concentrating. The hard crust can shift my denture painfully. Half an hour has passed since I came in. I finish the sandwich and get up to rinse the plate, and then I come and sit back down again in front of this mess of papers on the table.
I have only these words to justify my life. The words flow on, page after page, day after day. Probably I won’t ever read them again, and nor will anyone else. It doesn’t matter. My heart aches for Clarissa. And for Aazyr. But what is home? I have no home upon this world. The weak sun disappears again into the grey bleakness of sky, lost for the rest of the day.
Pass the daylight hours, that is all. That is my task, that is my journey. Silence fills the room. The clock ticks. I have to learn to be my own teacher. I will never know the future. I must not think about tomorrow.
It’s raining again.
The labyrinth of days. How to fill the time? An old man spaces his actions carefully. The worst threat to an old man’s wellbeing becomes his own mind. It can easily lead him into melancholy depression, painfully allayed to the guilt of knowing that he has little to complain about really. I have food. I have a home. I have my health. For all of which I’m truly grateful. I thank God everyday. But still I feel abandoned, useless, like an old horse put out to grass. There’s no use trying to understand. I know nothing, just that an old man’s life is measured in fractions of the day. I don’t even try to understand anymore.
Young people try to understand. The old man knows that there can never be any real understanding of any truth that man can really ever know. Truth recedes, like the end of a rainbow. The truth will always reveal itself deeper and more complex, so what point searching?
I woke this morning with some thought I needed to write down. It was just one sentence. But it was too cold to get up and so I didn’t record it. Now it’s forgotten. I wake like a captive bird from freedom dreams of wings and sunshine, to the hopeless world of conscious thought. No shaft of sun, no ray of light, reaches the cage that shelters and protects me, while at the same time it denies me freedom and purpose of living. There is great sadness in my heart.
This depression is always with me, worst always in the morning. It’s my old companion. Another day stretches ahead. How to pass the long hours between now until nightfall, when I can sleep and dream again? So I fill pages with words. I don’t think about tomorrow. I don’t even think about the rest of today. The sky is cold.
I just have to get through the day that stretches ahead of me, the empty desert of hours. I only have to survive till nightfall. Night is my destination. The night is my friend. The night makes no demands. Nothing physical can satisfy me now: no food or drink, no woman’s kiss, no book or music. The cheeky, squawking gulls wake thin, hard wings into the wind: twisting, crying, fishing off the gale. Gulls, white as froth blown off the sea.
There is no sunlight through my window. Just grey. Everything seems pointless to me. There’s always a hollow darkness inside me now. I hear voices outside my window, the sounds of traffic starting on the road, the clank of chains, the clatter of wheels and axles, the clopping sound of the horses hooves, straining up the hill. Another day begins. My heart is breaking. It’s still early morning, I write these words, sitting here at the table that I made myself. This house has become for me a prison.
Sometimes, when it’s not raining, I make a sandwich and take a backpack and walk up on the mountains. I spend whole days up there in summer beneath big leafy trees and beside small streams that tumble cold and clear and fast over ancient stones. I thank God always for my legs. Life is a fragile thing, is it not?
I owe so much to Clarissa. She is no longer in this world, but always close to me in spirit. She does not judge me. Without her I think I would just dig a hole for myself and die in it. But, as she used to say: we must always try to remind ourselves of where right prevails over wrong, to create the right intention and to see in entirety.
Wisdom is in the will to bestow.
There is no yesterday or tomorrow in this place, no morning and no afternoon. Expectation leads to certain disappointment. Expect nothing. That’s the first rule. I have only my words today.
Leave the why to greater ones. My mind swings like a pendulum. I deal with each day, hour by hour. Small things become important. I am careful always. The mornings are not good for me, in this grey, lonely place. I want nothing more of this world but that it should let me go. Oh, Holy Eloih, take away this grief. Put a stamp upon it. Mark it with a sign of death and pain, and scythe it away. I cannot do it alone. You are all powerful. But when you speak, yours is a small, still voice. You who created the world and all the universe. You care nothing for appearances. I know I have no human wisdom. I know I am alone.
The mountains surround me, here in the village where I live. Outside my window fallen leaves blow and scurry in eddies, scraping upon the black paved road, outside a yellow door. The leaves are gold and red and brown. They seem to glow from within with warmth of colour against the grey and black of approaching winter. Carriages rush past my window outside in the street. The leaves scrape and scurry. In here, it’s just me. Just me. The clock ticks.
I wash my clothes in the bathtub, and hang them outside under the cold grey sky to drip for a while. They won’t ever dry properly there, but later I’ll bring them inside again to dry properly over the heater in the main room. I smoke my pipe outside on the paved courtyard, where the trees have lost their leaves, and then I bang the ashes out against the grey stone wall and return inside, spacing my movements.
The morning’s nearly gone now. It’s nearly noon. The afternoon stretches ahead. When it gets dark I’ll warm the rest of the broth I made yesterday, and eat it, and then go to bed, with a book, knowing that the day is over and that I own the equalizing night, as rightfully as any man; all men are equal in sleep.
I make a sandwich in my small kitchen and chew it carefully, with little enjoyment, concentrating. The hard crust can shift my denture painfully. Half an hour has passed since I came in. I finish the sandwich and get up to rinse the plate, and then I come and sit back down again in front of this mess of papers on the table.
I have only these words to justify my life. The words flow on, page after page, day after day. Probably I won’t ever read them again, and nor will anyone else. It doesn’t matter. My heart aches for Clarissa. And for Aazyr. But what is home? I have no home upon this world. The weak sun disappears again into the grey bleakness of sky, lost for the rest of the day.
Pass the daylight hours, that is all. That is my task, that is my journey. Silence fills the room. The clock ticks. I have to learn to be my own teacher. I will never know the future. I must not think about tomorrow.
It’s raining again.
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