#caelica

[poem-today]

A poem by Fulke Greville

Caelica 56

All my senses, like beacon's flame, Gave alarum to desire To take arms in Cynthia's name And set all my thoughts on fire: Fury's wit persuaded me, Happy love was hazard's heir, Cupid did best shoot and see In the night where smooth is fair; Up I start believing well To see if Cynthia were awake; Wonders I saw, who can tell? And thus unto myself I spake: "Sweet God Cupid, where am I, That by pale Diana's light, Such rich beauties do espy, As harm our senses with delight? Am I borne up to the skies? See where Jove and Venus shine, Showing in her heavenly eyes That desire is divine. Look where lies the milken way, Way unto that dainty throne, Where while all the Gods would play, Vulcan thinks to dwell alone." I gave reins to this conceit, Hope went on the wheel of lust; Fancy's scales are false of weight, Thoughts take thought that go of trust. I stepped forth to touch the sky, I a God by Cupid dreams; Cynthia, who did naked lie, Runs away like silver streams, Leaving hollow banks behind Who can neither forward move, Nor, if rivers be unkind, Turn away or leave to love. There stand I, like Arctic pole, Where Sol passeth o'er the line, Mourning my benighted soul, Which so loseth light divine. There stand I like men that preach From the execution place, At their death content to teach All the world with their disgrace. He that lets his Cynthia lie Naked on a bed of play, To say prayers ere she die, Teacheth time to run away. Let no love‑desiring heart In the stars go seek his fate, Love is only Nature's art. Wonder hinders Love and Hate.** None can well behold with eyes** But what underneath him lies.

Fulke Greville (1554-1628)

Image: Woman with a Parrot (1866) by Gustave Courbet, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

[kotton-kandy-kane]

When Breath Becomes Air

My favorite quotes and moments from this magnificent book by the late Paul Kalanithi.

"What makes life worth living in the face of death?"

"You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath. New names unknown, old names gone: Till time end bodies, but souls none. Reader! then make time, while you be, But steps to your eternity." ~ Baron Brooke Fulke Greville, "Caelica 83"

"Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor."

"The neatness of medical diagrams did nothing to represent Nature, red not only in tooth and claw but in birth as well."

"Maybe life is merely an "instant", too brief to consider. But my focus would have to be on my imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death -- the grave digger with the forceps."

"I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking. (…) In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun."

"Technical excellence was not enough. As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives - everyone dies eventually - but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness."

"In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death's enemy, but as its ambassador."

"If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live." ~ Michel de Montaigne, 'That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die'

"Had the confirmation of my fears -in the CT scan, in the lab results, both showing not merely cancer but a body overwhelmed, nearing death- released me from the duty to serve, from my duty to patients, to neurosurgery, to the pursuit of goodness? Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid."

"If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?"

"She asked. 'Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?' 'Wouldn't it be great if it did?' I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristics of the organism is striving."

"Shouldn't terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it?"

"Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward."

"I can't go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett's seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I'll go on."

"That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge."

"And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't 'Feel guilty all the time'. Maybe it is more along these lines: 'We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time.'"

"Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete."

"Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too."

"Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love -to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful."

[kiwikeewan]

sometimes i think about celica (fire emblem 2) and how because i wasn't into fe at the time the moment she got in the gacha game (because nobody actually played fe2) everyone was talking about celica, celica, celica… and i was wondering are you guys talkin about the car, did they add cars to fire emblem ultimately it just seems like they were both coincidentally pulled from the same latin word caelica. but was it really a coincidence?

[makingperfect]

Air that once was breath - Caelica 83

[totheescapement]

[austentatious]

You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath. New names unknown, but souls none.           Reader! then make time, while you be,           But steps to your eternity.

Caelica 83 | Baron Brooke Fulke Greville

[herelies-j]

"But love is of the phoenix-kind,

And burns itself in self-made fire,

To breed still new birds in the mind,

From ashes of the old desire."

—Fulke Greville, from Caelica, Sonnet 61

[lizaip]

You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath. New names unknown, old names gone:  Till time end bodies, but souls none. Reader! then make time, while you be,  But steps to your eternity.

Baron Brooke Fulke Grevile, Caelica 83

[poemoftheday]

Poem of the Day 26 March 2021

Caelica 4: You little stars that live in skies | BY FULKE GREVILLE You little stars that live in skies And glory in Apollo’s glory, In whose aspècts conjoinèd lies The heaven’s will and nature’s story, Joy to be likened to those eyes, Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry;   For when you force thoughts from above,   These overrule your force by love.

And thou, O Love, which in these eyes Hast married Reason with Affection, And made them saints of Beauty’s skies, Where joys are shadows of perfection, Lend me thy wings that I may rise Up, not by worth, but thy election;   For I have vowed in strangest fashion   To love and never seek compassion.

[witherawayluna]

You seek that what life is in death,

Now find it air that was once breath.

New names unknown, old names gone:

Till time ends bodies, but souls none.

Reader! then make time, while you be,

But steps to your eternity.

-Baron Brooke Fulke Greville, "Caelica 83"

[poem-today]

A poem by Fulke Greville

CAELICA: SONNET LXXXVII

The earth, with thunder torn, with fire blasted,    With waters drowned, with windy palsy shaken, Cannot for this with heaven be distasted,    Since thunder, rain, and winds from earth are taken. Man, torn with love, with inward furies blasted,    Drowned with despair, with fleshly lustings shaken, Cannot for this with heaven be distasted :    Love, fury, lustings out of man are taken. Then man, endure thyself, those clouds will vanish.    Life is a top which whipping Sorrow driveth, Wisdom must bear what our flesh cannot banish,    The humble lead, the stubborn bootless striveth : Or, man, forsake thyself, to heaven turn thee, Her flames enlighten nature, never burn thee. 

FULKE GREVILLE

1554-1628

[theseasidelibrary]

You that seek what life is in death, now find it air that was once breath New names unknown, old names gone: Till time end bodies, but souls none. Reader! then make time, while you be, But steps to your eternity.

Baron Brooke Fulke Greville, Caelica 83

[protestantfaceofanglicanism]

The home of Fulke Greville, Protestant poet of the greatest depth and friend of Sir Philip Sydney. He wrote the ‘Caelica’ sonnets, the last six or so of which are musts for readers of this blog.

[sowingseedsandshootinghoops]

When Breath Becomes Air: How to Live a Life of Meaning from the Point of View of a Neurosurgeon Dying from Lung Cancer

Note on the text: I used Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air as published by Random House in 2016. 

Paul Kalanithi was a student of neurosurgery at Stanford who was diagnosed with, and even died from, a severe form of lung cancer. The title of his autobiography come from the first two lines of Caelica 83 by Fulke, as quoted on the introductory page: “You that seek what life is in death;/ now find it air that once was breath” (Introductory page). These lines really helped elucidate the central theme of the book: what makes life meaningful?

When ever since he was a child, Paul was an avid reader of books and had seen scores of authors attempt to answer this question, with varying degrees of success. But he didn’t think about it too deeply, especially in terms of the brain, until he was a student at Stanford, studying English, and encountered a book entitled Satan: His psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr Kassler, J.S.P.S. by Jeremy Levin, a book which he otherwise hated. However he was intrigued by the book’s assertion that what is called mind is just another function of the brain. Kalanithi says that it was 

an idea that struck [him] with force. . . . Of course it must be true- what were our brains doing otherwise? Though we had free will, we were also biological organisms-the brain was an organ, subject to the laws of physics too! Literature provided a rich account of human meaning; the brain, then was the machinery that somehow enabled it. It seemed like magic (30). 

It was then that he decided to started taking classes in neuroscience and biology. Eventually he decided to pursue post graduate studies as a neurosurgeon. However he always saw what he he was doing in the medical field as the practical application of the various philosophies of life that he had encountered. It was only in “practicing medicine that [he] could pursue a serious biological philosophy” and see where it was that “biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersected” in the creation of a meaningful life (43, 41). 

It’s clear that he sees brain, meaning the organ itself, and mind, the more philosophic “thought center”, as being intricately linked together, and that both serve an important function in the process of creating a meaningful life. He continuously comments on how “the brain mediates our experience of the world” and how any damage to the brain forces people to ask the question “what makes life meaningful enough to go on living?” (71). Yet the brain itself isn’t enough. In order to create a meaningful life, we must move beyond the realm of that physical organ and into the more metaphysical world of mind. In the aftermath of his diagnosis, Paul became very aware of this fact. Despite all the knowledge he had regarding what his body was going through, he needed to dive into the deeper realm of mind in order to be able to really understand, much less much express to others, what he was going through. What it was like to know that you are dying and how that affects you. So he dove back into literature and read “anything written by anyone who had written anything about mortality. [He] was searching for a vocabulary with which [he could] make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining [himself] and [begin] inching forward again” (148). Although it helped for him to understand what his body was going through as a physical organism, it wasn’t enough. He needed the words to describe what he was going through as an individual, not just as a generic man-with-cancer. He thought in a similar way regarding the brain and mind and their ability to help us live a meaningful life. 

We need both our minds and our brains. Brains live in the world of science, of facts, of universal laws that can be understood and that are adhered to by more or less everyone. Minds exist in a world of subjectivity and personal opinion, and even “if a correct answer is possible, verification is certainly impossible” (172). No one really knows why Suzy loves Joey instead of Stevie. It’s a mystery. Ultimately both viewpoints offer valuable insight and neither has the answer all on its own. Science offers us the best way to learn about the physical world, including the brain, and how it works, by giving us the “most useful way to organize empirical reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between these passions and scientific [theories] there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience” (170). In other words, science’s strength lies in the fact that it can explain tangible, related, and universal facts, which is incredibly important, but in doing so it misses an incredible important part of the human experience which is the subjective experience of the individual: 

The problem however eventually becomes evident: to make science the arbitrator of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, [and] meaning. . . a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to believe that science provides no basis for meaning and therefore life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight” (169). 

So you need to understand both physics and metaphysics, you need both a brain and a mind, in order to figure out how to live a life that is meaningful. 

The truth is that the business of figuring out how to live a life that is meaningful is a tough business to be in precisely because 

your values are constantly changing. You figure out what matters to you and then you keep figuring it out. . . . . You may decide you want to spend your time as a neurosurgeon, but two months later you may feel differently. Two months after that you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church (160-161). 

Ultimately how do we create meaning for ourselves? We make decisions. We at some point decide what is important to us and how we are going to live our lives, and we do this because we are, underneath it all, meaning-making machines. Kalanithi talks about how the uncertainty regarding how much time he had to live affected the way in which he viewed himself and was blocking him from being able to lead the full and meaningful life that he wanted. He did not know if he had enough time to go back and finish his studies, or if he should just focus on being a good husband and a philanthropic member of community and live as if he were going to die tomorrow. Until one day he made the decision that he was going to live his life as if he was going to life forever, and go back to serving people as a neurosurgeon resident for as long as he could. The way he describes it, somewhat humorously, is that he had gone through all the stages of grief just to arrive at denial: “And now, finally, maybe I had arrived at denial. Maybe total denial. Maybe in the absence of any certainty we should just assume that we’re going to live a long time. Maybe that’s the only way forward” (162). 

So what is it that makes life meaningful? Kalanithi doesn’t provide a definitive answer. After all he can only speak for himself. But there are a few things that he does know about making life meaningful. He knows that the brain is important in this process, as is the mind. But what is perhaps most important is that people can find life-fulfilling meaning in a variety of ways, in whatever they do. So not everyone may find it in neurosurgery like he did, others may find it in teaching, or simply finding ways to love the people around them, and that’s ok. All those ways are equally valid. Sometimes people can have the most impact, and can find that life-defining level of meaning, in ways that, to others, might seem insignificant, even though they really aren’t. Just look at the words he writes to his daughter Caty, who is too young to have any living memory of her father, at the close of the book: 

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of who you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests satisfied. [And] in this time, right now, that is an enormous thing (199). 

Sometimes it will be in the small things that you find the most meaningful way to live your life, sometimes it’ll be in the big ones. Either way it is safe to say that both your brain and your mind will help you on the path to deciding what a meaningful life is to you and how to live it. 

[forsoothsayer]

Caelica 4: You Little Stars That Live In Skies by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville

You little stars that live in skies And glory in Apollo’s glory, In whose aspècts conjoinèd lies The heaven’s will and nature’s story, Joy to be likened to those eyes, Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry;   For when you force thoughts from above,   These overrule your force by love. And thou, O Love, which in these eyes Hast married Reason with Affection, And made them saints of Beauty’s skies, Where joys are shadows of perfection, Lend me thy wings that I may rise Up, not by worth, but thy election;   For I have vowed in strangest fashion   To love and never seek compassion.