On Douglas Murray's "Things Worth Remembering"
An idea worth drawing for.
This visual essay is a tribute to Douglas Murray. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.
Two years before his death, the poet W. H. Auden explained that the arts are “our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. After all, Homer is dead, his society is gone, but we can read The Iliad and find in it significance and meaning. And I personally think without communication with the dead a fully human life is not possible.” Throughout the past year,1 Douglas Murray has broken bread with dead poets in his Sunday column called “Things Worth Remembering.” In each installment he shared a poem (or a piece of a poem) that he has memorized, along with thoughts and stories like that insight from Auden.
Auden singled out the arts — not, for example, technological progress, religious tradition, or the study of history in general — as necessary for a fully human life. Certainly, had we been unable to accumulate knowledge through the millennia, then we would be perpetual cavemen rediscovering fire, because no father would have taught his son how to light a flame. But apes, elephants, and otters can fashion tools out of sticks and stones, while no other creature can write a poem. Where religions offer meaning for those who adhere to them, art can be universal. We do not need to believe in the Greek Pantheon to find significance and meaning in The Iliad.
And art has more soul than a history lesson. This is not a slight against scholarship. It is a division of labor. While history informs, art expresses the angst, ennui, rapture, and hope that color the human condition. When we commune with dead poets, we borrow the right words to articulate our experiences — those “aha!” moments when we say, “Yes, that's exactly what it feels like.”
Out of all the selections in “Things Worth Remembering,” the poem fragment that I think most succinctly expresses the human condition comes from Andrew Marvell. As Murray puts it, the line is a heartbreaker that grabs you immediately:
Had we but world enough and time
Those seven words say it all. They convey the acute longing to persist, the horror and incomprehensibility of ceasing to be. Whenever I think about ceasing it feels as if my blood pauses and then reverses course in my veins, retreating from inevitability. My heart groans.
At the beginning of this soul-fortifying series, Murray prefaced that, “Only a few writers will crop up here more than once, and only three will appear several times. To nobody's surprise, one of these will be the greatest poet of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot.” So when I imagine Murray breaking bread with the dead, I picture him in an intimate conversation with Eliot, as I drew them together above. Murray wrote, “I needed to live with this man.”
Why? In his youth, Murray heard someone recite Eliot's “Four Quartets" and explain that the poem helped him stave off madness for five years when he was a hostage chained to basement radiators in Beirut. This encounter gave Murray “a deep feeling of: ‘You may need this someday.’” Though as a journalist Murray has recently visited war zones in Ukraine and Gaza, fortunately he has not yet needed his vast reservoir of memorized poems for such desperate ends. But if his luck runs out, Murray is prepared:
Among much else the message is that what you have up here, in your head, the bastards cannot take. They can rob you, arrest you, disappear you, perhaps even kill you. Perhaps they can kill almost everyone, or at least make a very good try. But they cannot take a memory once it is embedded like this.
…
So long as we carry what we have up here — so long as we furnish our heads with the important things — nothing important can truly die.
This story helped me understand the compulsion I felt to memorize poems about death after some blunt trauma knocked out my youthful sense of immortality.2
Impermanence is offensive to thinking and feeling beings. No wonder, then, that themes of war, death, and loss emerge in most of Murray's poetry installments, from poets who grapple with our harsh reality. In each instance when he quotes from T. S. Eliot, Murray gives us words from the great poet that help us lick our wounds.
Here is Eliot's wistful expression of how we have neither world enough nor time:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
To those of us who agonize over unopened doors, Eliot admonished:
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Perhaps the most cutting Eliot verse invokes the pain inherent in even the most joyous of human experiences:
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different
When Murray quotes from Eliot's most recognizable work, The Wasteland, he resurrects a “plaintive line" that only exists in earlier drafts: I remember/ the hyacinth garden. Had it survived editing, it would have been the one happy moment in a famously unhappy poem. Murray shared commentary on this excised verse by Eliot's wife, who observed, “the moment conjures up an observation made by Francesca in The Inferno [V. 121-3] as she relates her sad tale to Dante: ‘There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness.’”
Poets like T. S. Eliot help us suffer well; in return, we help them overcome mortality in some small way, when we break bread with the dead.
Murray's year of poetry just concluded. But “Things Worth Remembering" continues with weekly excerpts of outstanding oratory.
My own memorized poems crop up from time to time in Fashionably Late Takes. You will find a Dylan Thomas excerpt here:
And a reference to Mary Oliver here:
