CHILDREN'S SONG

A lovely poem from the great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, recalling the mysterious world of childhood and how adults are excluded from it.   I particularly like the fact that the poem is  from a child's perspective.

Children’s Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R S Thomas

Hannah Arendt

A truly remarkable woman I would have liked to have met.   Her philosophy is profound and positive,  offering hope in the uniqueness of people and of their capacity to change.   We are not commodities or merely homogenised  units of consumption but truly remarkable and different from the animals by our capacity to forgive and to make and keep promises.

A woman who experienced great personal loss and turmoil including her need to flee Nazi Germany and to witness her former lover and former lecturer Heidegger condone through inactivity,  National Socialism and it's anti-semitic policies.   Forced to flee Germany she eventually settled in the USA becoming the first female professor of politics at Princeton University.

Arendt coined the phrase the 'banality of evil'  and her seminal book Eichmann in Jerusalem follows this theme.  


"Your birth was a truly new beginning, an opportunity for something to come into being that was not there before."