Hi Snoopy,
The name "Philip Larkin" caught my eye, being an admirer of his poetry.............which I have described elsewhere as being often bleak, yet tinged with compassion for the human situation. The line quoted rang some sort of bell, and I looked it up. It is actually the final line of Larkin's poem "An Arundel Tomb", which centres around a sculptured gravestone of an ancient Earl and Countess.................perhaps seeking in stone what can never be in truth?
The final verse reads.......
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Given Larkin's outlook, perhaps the word
almost holds the key, at least for him?
Anyway, I did give the linked article a look. Whatever the merits of the ideas spoken of, personally I'm always virtually unmoved by such arguments, however sound, in whatever way. That "love" is eternal seems to be a "truth" that unveils itself in other ways, at least for me. Maybe we need to move for a while in the "almost-instinct almost true" of a Godless nihilistic chaos.........
For the garden is the only place there is, yet we shall not find it until we have searched everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert
(W.H.Auden)
Maybe in the end we do create our own worlds........
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept. (Auden, again)
....create our own worlds? Well, unless Grace steps in......
