“Faces From the Wood“- At the West End Gallery
I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!
― Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
On a morning when I am feeling more than a bit misanthropic, I thought I’d express it in the lightest manner I could muster. I guess the verse above from English poet Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) might do the trick.
I don’t know much about this particular Raleigh and, feeling as I do this morning, don’t really care. Don’t know if he was descended from the more famous Walter Raleigh, the one I best knew from seeing his face on my one aunt’s cigarette packs as a kid. I would imagine so but what does it really matter?
For those of you more interested, this particular Walter Raleigh was a professor of literature at Oxford and that bit of light verse was titled Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914.
It might be titled Wishes of a Near Elderly Man, Wished in an Art Studio, August 2021.
I thought of going with a different piece of verse this morning, like this short bit from Ape and Essence, the lesser known dystopian novel from Aldous Huxley:
The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.
Or I guess I could have went with this simple quote from the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840):
You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.
It’s not verse but maybe it gets closer to the bone. Perhaps even closer is this passage from Sinclair Lewis, as laid out it in his It Can’t Happen Here:
… he loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons…
That might best describe my misanthropic urge this morning. And every other morning.
I like and love people individually but on the whole very much dislike persons in the collective sense.
I am not talking about you guys. No, you’re okay.
Really.
I hope you will excuse my curmudgeonly behavior this morning. Now get out of here.
And stay off my lawn…
We all have, those, days when we wake up, and, don’t, quite, feel right, but, it’s, okay too, that, we feel, the way we feel…
True…
Gary – you are a true introvert – as I am. I totally understand! Loni K.
Hii, Loni– So good to hear from you! Thanks. I think there are quite a few of us out there, don’t you?
Absolutely and unfortunately, we are often misunderstood.
whats to love about the human race in this era of trump and neo fascist idealogies, of human stupidity and an ever changing world of making everything more complicated coupled with complete and total disregard for the natural world along with a total inability to think of long term consequences, hmmm nothing, nothing to love at all, i have only hate for my own kind. The entire human race is nothing but a worthless pile of stinking shit
You make a compelling case and I can’t say I disagree. Most mornings I go further in my disdain for our race than your ‘worthless pile of stinking shit.’ But I remind myself that this, our time here, may be the only shot we get for our atoms to assemble in human form and that we are still capable at times of beauty and grace and goodness. Beautiful flowers sometimes spring from piles of shit, after all. You can hold onto your hatred but look out for the flowers in the shitpile when you come across them and try not to stomp them.
With as awful as things look right now, I am sure that sounds like a load of shit to you. And it might be– I am human, after all.