moth of time

I was checking our shelves for some books two days ago and found this. It's a book entitled, 'A Stone, A Leaf, A Door', a collection of poems by Thomas Wolfe. I tried browsing the book and found a long poem, it consumed eleven pages of the book. Here it is:

This Is Man

by Thomas Wolfe

For what is man?

First, a child,  soft-boned,

Unable to support itself on its rubbery legs,

Befouled with its excrement,

That howls and laughs by turns,

Cries for the moon 

But hushes when it gets it's mother's teat ;

A sleeper, eater, guzzler,

Howler, laugher, idiot,

And a chewer of its toe;

A little tender thing

All blubbered with its spit,

A reacher into fires,

A beloved fool.

After that, a boy,

Hoarse and loud before his companions,

But afraid of the dark;

Will beat the weaker and avoid the stronger;

Worships strength and savagery,

Loves tales of war and murder, and violence done to 

        others;

Joins gangs and hates to be alone;

Makes heroes out of soldiers, sailors,

Prize-fighters, football players,

Cowboys, gunmen, and detectives;

Would rather die than not out-try

And out-dare his companions,

Wants to beat them and always to win,

Shows his muscle

And demands that it be felt,

Boasts of his victories

And will never own defeat.

Then the youth:

Goes after girls, is foul behind their backs

Among the drugstore boys,

Hints at a hundred seductions,

But gets pimples on his face;

Begins to think about his clothes,

Becomes a fop, greases his hair,

Smokes cigarettes with a dissipated air,

Reads novels, and writes poetry on the sly.

He sees the world now

As a pair of legs and breasts;

He knows hate, love, and jealousy;

He is cowardly and foolish,

He cannot endure to be alone;

He lives in a crowd, thinks with the crowd,

Is afraid to be marked off from his fellows

By an eccentricity.

He joins clubs and is afraid of ridicule;

He is bored and unhappy

And wretched most of the time.

There is a great cavity in him,

He is dull.

Then the man:

He is busy,

He is full of plans and reasons,

He has work.

He gets children,

Buys and sells small packets of everlasting earth,

Intrigues against his rivals,

Is exultant when he chaets them.

He wastes his little three-score years and ten

In spendthrift and inglorious living;

From his cradle to his grave

He scarcely sees

The sun or moon or stars;

He is unconscious of the immortal sea and earth;

He talks of the future

And he wastes it as it comes.

If he is lucky, he saves money.

At the end, his fat purse buys him flunkeys

To carry him where his shanks no longer can;

He consumes rich food and golden wine

That his wretched stomach has no hunger for;

His weary and lifeless eyes

Look out upon the scenery of strange lands

For which in youth his heart was painting.

Then the slow death,

Prolonged by costly doctors;

And finally the graduate undertakers,

The perfumed carrion,

The suave ushers with palms outspread to leftwards,

The fast motor-hearses,

And the earth again.

This is man:

A writer of books, a putter-down of words,

A painter of pictures,

A maker of ten thousand philosophies,

He grows passionate over ideas,

He hurls scorn and mockery at another's work,

He finds the one way, the true way, for himself,

And calls all others false-

Yet in the billion books upon the shelves

There is not one that can tell him

How to draw a single fleeting breath

In peace and comfort.

He makes histories of the universe,

He directs the destiny of nations,

But he does not know his own history,

And he cannot direct his own destiny

With dignity or wisdom

For ten consecutive minutes.

This is man:

For the most part

A foul, wretched, abominable creature,

A packet of decay,

A bundle of degenerating tissues,

A creature that gets old and hairless

And has a foul breath,

A hater of his kind,

A cheater, a scorner,

A mocker, a reviler,

A thing that kills and murders in a mob

Or in the dark,

Loud and full of brag surrounded by his fellows,

But without the courage of a rat, alone.

He will cringe for a coin,

And show his snarling fangs behind the giver's back;

He will cheat for two sous,

And kill for forty dollars,

And weep copiously in court

To keep another scoundrel out of jail.

This is man,

Who will steal his friend's woman,

Feel the leg of his host's wife below the table-cloth,

Dump fortunes on his whores,

Bow down in worship before charlatans,

And let his poets die.

This is man,

Who swears who will live only

For beauty, for art, for the spirit,

But will live only

For fashion,

And will change his faith and his convictions

As soon as fashion changes.

This is man,

The great warrior with a flaccid gut,

The great romantic with the barren loins,

The eternal knave devouring the eternal fool,

The most glorious of all the animals,

Who uses his brain for the most part

To make himself a stench

In the nostrils of the Bull, the Fox, 

The Dog, the Tiger, and the Goat.

Yes, this is man,

And it is impossible to say the worst of him,

For the record of his obscene existence,

His baseness, lust, cruelty, and treachery,

Is illimitable.

His life is also full of toil, tumult, and suffering.

His days are mainly composed

Of a million idiot repetitions-

In goings and comings along hot streets,

In sweatings and freezings,

In the senseless accumulation of fruitless tasks,

In decaying and  being patched,

In grinding out his life

So that he may buy bad food,

In eating bad food

So that he may grind his life out

In destressful defecations.

He is the dweller on that ruined tenement

Who, from one moment's breathing to another,

Can hardly forget the bitter weight of his uneasy flesh,

The thousand diseases and distresses of his body,

The growing incubus of his corruption.

This is man,

Who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy

        and happiness

Out of all his years,

Ten moments unmarked by care,

Unseamed by aches or itches,

Has power to lift himself with his expiring breath,

And say: "I have lived upon this earth

And known glory!"

This is man,

And one wonders why he wants to live at all.

A third of his life is lost and deadened under sleep;

Another third is given to a sterile labor;

A sixth is spent in all his goings and his comings;

In the moil and shuffle of the streets,

In thrusting, shoving, pawing.

How much for him is left, then,

For a vision of the tragic stars?

How much of him is left

To look upon the everlasting earth?

How much of him is left for glory

And the making of great songs?

A few snatched moments only

From the barren glut and suck of living.

Here, then, is man,

This moth of time,

This dupe of brevity and numbered hours,

This travesty of waste and sterile breath.

Yet if the gods could come here

To  a desolate, deserted earth

Where only the ruin of man's cities remained,

Where only a few marks and carvings of his hand

Were legible upon his broken tablets,

Where only a wheel lay rusting in the desert sand,

A cry would burst out of their hearts

And they would say:

"He lived, and he was here!"

Behold his works:

He needed speech to ask for bread-and he had Christ!

He needed songs to sing in battle-and he had Homer!

He needed words to curse his enemies-

And he had Dante, he had Voltaire, he had Swift!

He needed cloth to cover up his hairless, puny flesh

        against the seasons-

And he wove the robes of Solomon,

He made the garments of great kings,

He made the samite for the young knights!

He needed walls and a roof to shelter him-

And he made Blois!

He needed a temple to propitiate his God-

And he made Chartres and Fountains Abbey!

He was born to creep upon the earth-

And he made great wheels,

He sent great engines thundering down the rails,

He launched great wings into the air,

He put great ship upon the angry sea!

Plagues wasted him,

And cruel wars destroyed his sons,

Bbut fire, flood, and famine could not quench him.

No, nor the inexorable grave-

His sons leaped shouting from his dying loins.

The shaggy bison with his thews of thunder

Died upon the plains;

The fabled mammoths of the unrecorded ages

Are vast scaffoldings of dry insensate loam;

The panthers have learned caution

And move carefully among tall grasses to the water-

        hole;

And man lives on

Amid the senseless nihilism of the universe.

For there is one belief, one faith,

That is man's glory, his triumph, his immortality-

And that is his belief in life.

Man loves life,

And loving life, hates death,

And because of this he is great, he is glorious,

He is beautiful, and his beauty is everlasting.

He lives below the senseless stars

And writes his meanings in them.

He lives in fear, in toil,

In agony, and in unending tumult,

But if the blood foamed bubbling from his wounded 

        lungs

At every breath he drew,

He would still love life more dearly

Than an end of breathing.

Dying, his eyes burn beautifully,

And the old hunger shines more fiercely in them-

He has endured all the hard and purposeless suffering,

And still he wants to live.

Thus it is impossible to scorn this creature.

For out of his strong belief in life,

This puny man made love.

At his best,

He is love.

Without him 

There can be no love,

No hunger, no desire.

So this is man-the worst and best of him-

This frail and petty thing

Who lives his day

And dies like all other animals,

And is forgotten.

And yet, he is immortal, too.

For both the good and evil that he does

Live after him.

Why, then, should any living man

Ally himself with death,

And, in his greed and blindness,

Batten on his brother's blood?

When I read the whole poem, it wasn't difficult to understand unlike poems  made by other poets like Shakespeare, Cummings or Frost. It sounded more like a reflection in verse form, the way it was written gives value to every word. Words tend to be heavy basing it from the structure of the stanzas...every line gives a strong emotion. The part where the poet said that man is just a 'moth of time' but that 'he is great, he is glorious'  really struck me.  This is similar to what Pascal said that 'man is a reed...but he is a thinking reed.' Clearly paradoxical, puny but great, weak but strong, almost saying that man is himself a paradox. The poem sounds existentialist, the center of meaning is in man's very existence. If Descartes said 'Cogito ergo sum.' (I think therefore I am.)

An existentialist like Unamuno would say 'Sum ergo cogito.'(I am therefore I think.)