A friend of mine recently dealt with a potentially tricky situation between us with tremendous grace and courage. Their honesty brought to mind this poem about its opposite—a poem I have long loved with a deep sense of melancholy, fearing that it spoke The Truth. It’s always a great relief when I remember the poem speaks the poet’s truth, with which we all may resonate sometimes, but which need not be The Whole or Only. See what you think about Larkin’s ‘Talking in Bed‘:
Interesting that I’d misremembered the title of this poem as ‘Lying in bed’. The poem has that unmistakeable Larkin-y conjuring of profound existential isolation which weighs heavily on the speaker. I wonder if our Phil ever found ‘none of this cares for us’ a relief or only ever a cause for terror and desolation? (It calls to mind the Total Perspective Vortex in Hitchhikers, which is designed to offer the person inside it an experience of their absolute insignificance in terms of the universe, but which fails in its purpose because, when Zaphod gets into it, it’s inside a micro-universe designed specifically for him, so that rather than feel diminished he has it confirmed that he’s the most important person in the world!)
But yes, this poem speaks of how difficult relationships can be: how dishonesty separates us even when—or maybe especially when— we’re ‘[a]t ‘this unique distance from isolation’. The exquisitely painful diminishment from ‘true and kind’ to ‘not untrue and not unkind’ is so deftly conjured, and with it a sense of disappointment, failure, utter loneliness. However, I think there are times when ‘not untrue and not unkind’ is a great result. If intimacy can be defined as being real with each other—having the courage to be honestly us, even when we think/fear/know/don’t care that the other may not like it—then I salute people and moments when it is achieved, even partially. It can feel sooooooooooooooo vulnerable, which is where the courage comes in. But it’s the closest we can ever come to narrowing the gap between us and everything else.
Good to read poems about these often unspoken-of moments .
Yes indeed. We read to know we’re not alone, once again.