One of our problems atm here in the UK seems to be a confusion between foreground and background. We live as if world events, famous people and the News were the centre of our lives and emotionally important to us. But we can do nothing about them and are not in a personal relationship with the protagonists. We risk losing sight of our own sphere of influence, our own relationships and responsibilities, our own foreground.
My wonderful 90-year old neighbour Ian reminded me about Mathew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, possibly written on Arnold’s honeymoon :
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Adventures in Tory Land - Blog 