…”Test every work of intellect and faith/And everything that your own hands have wrought/And call those works extravagance of breath/ That are not suited for such men as come/ Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.”
W.B. Yeats, from,Vacillation.
Can you really laugh in the Valley of the Shadow of Death?
you can be brave, you can be dignified, and yes proud—i have seen all those, to my sorrow. To my sorrow and to my comfort. 1
But laughing? i mean, not like a sardonic world-weary smirk, but, you know,ROFL giggling?
I dont think so. Dowson was right:
“They are not long, the days of love and laughter/Joy and desire and hate:/ I think they have no portion in us after/ We pass the gate.”
He meant of course, after death, but i think we find laughter has stolen away before that, when we first have no choice acknowledge the approach of death.
(everybody knows ONE phrase from this poem:”the days of wine and roses” which occurs in the next verse.)
Joy and desire and certainly hate linger while life does, or so i believe. but not laughter.
“Smiles are for youth” Larkin wrote.
i wrote before, here or elsewhere, about the experience of being taken over by laughter, about laughing as effortlessly and involuntarily as we sneeze or yawn, but much more pleasurably than those.
Reader, can you laugh for laughter’s own sake? God bless you if you1 can. And God bless you if you can’t.
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 
“Smiles are for youth” Larkin wrote.
True indeed. I thoroughly enjoyed not knowing any better…
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Laughter (at oneself, methinks) is the best medicine.
Mocking evil people is also a gas!
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“Laughter (at oneself, methinks) is the best medicine.
Mocking evil people is also a gas!”
Absolutely! “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have them in derision.” [Psalm 2, verse 4, King James Version]
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This reminds me of my Dad, who lived to be 95 years old, and was in very good shape until a few months before he died. A year or two before he died, I brought him to a routine appointment with his cardiologist. The two of us were just waiting for the doctor to come in, and my Dad started to wax poetic about death, and about how the body breaks down with age-he was smiling and chuckling a little bit as he delivered the graphic and awful description of this process. It was shocking, and I was taken aback. I had no idea what to say, but I told my Dad that I was glad he could laugh about all of it. When I said that, he threw his head back and really laughed, and then, beaming from ear to ear, he said “Anybody over the age of 90 who can’t laugh about it has a problem.”
There is a line in the movie “Gladiator”. “Death smiles at all of us. The best a man can do is smile back.” Whenever I hear or think of that line, I think of my Dad. Thank you, Dad, and Thank you, Hypatia.
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JAXson with the ‘heat!’
Before anyone can take offense to the above, please be advised that I am using it in the same vein as the expression “bringing the heat” is used in baseball.
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Thank you so much, Simon 🙂
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Then Judy, Yeats must have known someone like your dad !
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Lucky him, and Lucky me to have known my Dad. I have been so incredibly Blessed.
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Attention Nanda: I knew C.S lewis had said something about “ so simple as a chuckle in the darkness” and I finally found the reference. But that phrase has always stuck in my mind. My BMD and I do that, when we first snuggle into bed: just giggle a bit..what’s so funny, I don’t know—it’s like a joke on the rest of the world, somehow. But what is “simple” about it? A chuckle in the darkness could be…scary, depending on who’s doing the chucklingI I wonder what Jack was thinking of?
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“But what is “simple” about it?”
Howdy, Hyp! Maybe Jack was relying on Psalm 2:4: “The one enthroned in heaven laughs; the LORD derides them ” [New American Bible: Revised Edition]. As I often do. War, and the painful death of a loved one may’ve opened Jack up to the small space between tears and laughter, perhaps?
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