“Lebensweisheitspielerei”

Back in my early sixties, I wrote, “Old age, indolent contemporary insinuating that, because you share a mutual inevitability, your lives were more or less the same.” That “indolent contemporary” really pissed me off. Differences mattered, made all the difference.

Several years ago, however—that is, a decade later—I was leafing through my poet-mother’s copy of Wallace Stevens’s verse, browsing for what might shed light on my present moment. On page 504, I reached “Lebensweisheitspielerei.”

In its fifteen lines, eighty-five words, and five verses, “The proud and the strong” are long gone, leaving “the unaccomplished, / The finally human.” In the “poverty of autumnal space,” there’s ever less to say, to pretend, to lay claim to. Which leads Stevens to conclude: “Each person completely touches us / With what he is and as he is, / In the stale grandeur of annihilation.”

The first few times I read this, I bridled: surely no one can know “what” and “as” someone else is. I also balked at grandeur and annihilation. Nonetheless, over the ensuing weeks and months I found myself returning to the poem. Eventually memorized its conclusion. Came to concur:

Each person completely touches usWith what he is and as he is,In the stale grandeur of annihilation.