Wretchard is awfully fond of “Dover Beach,” as am I, but there’s another poem by Matthew Arnold which I also think very highly of. It’s called “The Buried Life.”

An excerpt:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves–
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well–but ’tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Only–but this is rare–
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d–
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

**********************

Dearly as we may (and do) love our closest loved ones, no one person can ever know every last inner iota of us … no one person can ever tease out of us every expression of every longing of our heart.

So we carry around with us this sack of The Unexpressed: the thoughts unspoken, the dreams not realized, and yah, the road not taken. The older we get, the bigger the sack gets.

If we’re extremely blessed, we find, as Arnold writes, someone who ties together past, present & future … in whose company we find the purpose of all that Unexpressed. It’s not that we get to go back again, cuz we don’t. But if we’re extremely blessed, our dearly beloved helps make us okay with not going back. Temptation there might be, but we are okay with letting the Unexpressed remain that way.

One of the interesting coincidences I have run into is I befriended my wife’s nephew who is from Manila but lives & works in North Carolina. I was browsing his friends list and found a familiar name.

The name was one of my online UAE buddies (at the time it was via bulletin board) still in Dubai. Apparently my UAE buddy (whom I had managed to keep contact with for a couple of years after leaving the UAE) was a MNL classmate of our nephew.

FB and similar online social applications really centralize the management of friendship. I am not as active with LinkedIN but check it out from time to time.

Part of the FB appeal too is the superficial “friendship” one can claim with celebs. However, I don’t believe most celebs are at all involved with their facebook pages. However, I do believe the author/owner of this forum does check out FB every now and then.

The attraction to FB baffles me.

One word: convenience.

Based on my own experience, it seems to me a big reason we “could not be bothered to keep in touch with” these people in the first place is because it was such a huge hassle. So damn many addresses (snail-mail and e-mail), URLs, phone numbers etc. to keep track of, so damn little time. Facebook does to that hurdle pretty much what Nero does to Vulcan in the new Star Trek movie (I presume that if you haven’t already seen it, you don’t care to anyway so spoilage is irrelevant), by providing one single place to easily find and contact dozens if not hundreds of people.

Rome brought to its knees by binge-drinking Caesar!

The wife & I hosted some family for dinner, they left, we went to Goodwill for a customer appreciation night. I was lit up so my wife drove. We got there, she went in and I got out and started walking laps around the parking lot. Yeap — I put that up on FB — worded in a manner to sound worse than what it was. I don’t believe I have suffered any harm from that one, but it led to me to think a lot more about what I put up prior to publishing things.