Washed Away by the Sea

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is one of his prose works from which is drawn this famous quote/poem, No Man Is an Island. The devotional, according to Wikipedia, “covers death, rebirth, and the early modern concept of sickness as a visit from God, reflecting internal sinfulness.” Donne wrote Emergent Occasions while he recovered from a serious sickness. Donne, then, considered his illness constituted a holy message concerning his own sins.

Washed away by the sea. That simple phrase, alone, is poetic. It summons a wide array of emotions, from loneliness to emptiness to grief to regret…to a swirling combination of them all that will not release us from its grip.  And it recognizes the extent to which something of overwhelming significance can be expunged, its remnants disappearing beneath the waves as if it never mattered.

My mother, who was an English teacher, used Donne’s words and his insights in her classes and in her conversations with me. I do not recall our conversations addressing any religious overtones in Donne’s work. In fact, I recall very little about those conversations… only that they took place and they prompted me to think about the intersections between language and emotion.  I doubt I ever questioned her about whether either one could thrive without the other. But I remember thinking that language might languish without emotion—and emotion would remain grey and hidden without language.

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That year, 2020, was the point at which the spokes rusted through. The axles broke. The tires’ knotted steel treads began showing through where the rubber had worn away. Humankind would have been wise to have floored the accelerator and turned the steering wheel—hard—just as we approached the most dangerous curve above the highest cliff. The freedom we would have felt, just before smashing into the rocks where they meet the sea, could have left an eternal imprint on our souls. If we had souls.

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The view from my windows is odd this morning. Like I am looking at trees through dirty panes of glass, smudged and unwashed for decades.