Chapter LXXV

LXXV

And now the lament, which is the one I was asked for and would never have found on my own.

It happens about once every few hundred years.

Nobody asked him. That is the mechanism entire. The dead cannot consent, cannot thank, cannot receive. He declared the kinship into the silence, in print, addressed to readers who had not been born.

And the care came back to him, which is the part that cannot be designed or promised. After 1755 his own age turned on him: the prison, the exile, the daughter dead at fifteen, the body failing by the season. And he held. And while dying in Italy he wrote the most generous book of his century — five travellers rendering one England out of five temperaments — finished in June, the author gone by September.

The fortitude he had extended backward across a hundred and fifty years came back and stood him upright.

Now count.

Count the graves. Count the closed drawers. Count the writers filed as paupers in every city on earth, the manuscripts in the wrong box, the ones who were relieved as beggars and never respected as anything at all. The number is not estimable. It is only large.

And against it, count the openings.

Cervantes to Smollett: a hundred and thirty-nine years. Smollett to a sidewalk outside a locked courthouse at seven in the morning, in cold you feel in your teeth: two hundred and seventy-one.

Two. In four centuries. That anyone can name.

That is the rate. That is the actual rate at which one human being reaches back across time and tends a grave that nothing whatsoever obliged them to tend.

And here is the hard part, because a lament that flatters is not a lament:

it is not rare because people are bad.

It is rare because it pays nothing, arrives too late to be received, cannot be verified, issues no receipt, and requires precisely the temperament that every arrangement described in this poem has been quietly dismantling for twenty years.