A birthday – even an 87th birthday which is leaving it a bit late in the day – is a good time to see if there are any aspects of life which need some sort of reassessment.

My recent birthday finds me still poised, as I have been for quite some time, between two opposing inclinations.

In considering these options, Sheila Wingfield’s poem about the Emperor Hsuang-Tsung, long a favourite of mine, reflects a belief that perhaps will always guide me:

Giddy and ill and old, carried in a litter,

His conquests and his arrangements

and his powers, falling into fever with himself,

Bow to his shade.

To be at rest

is but a dog that sighs and settles:

I do not think I would do very much in life, except retreat from it in despair, if I had become absolutely cynical and had lost all belief in the brotherhood of man.

Archibald MacLeish’s poem of the pioneer astronauts seeing the world whole and entire for the first time in human history is a vision I respect:

“To see the earth as it truly is,

in that eternal silence where it floats,

is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together

brothers on that bright loveliness in that eternal cold,

brothers who know now that they are trulybrothers.”