This Too Shall Pass

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,

In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,

In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,

I too had receiv’d identity by my body,

That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.

-Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

If you've not been watching this last run of the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, you're truly missing something. Consigned to the rubbish heap come May by the authoritarians who now run CBS, the show has never been funnier, never sadder as each night some thoughtful person who'd been on the show before during its run of over a decade strides onto the stage one last time to share a little conversation with Colbert, my favorite product of Charleston, South Carolina. They reminisce, they cook, they talk about what's happening now. I alternate between roaring with laughter and holding back tears.

Last night's guest (actually Monday's, given that YouTube TV delays it a night) was Edward Norton, a brilliant actor and a fixture in many of Wes Anderson's movies. Norton's an interesting guy, Yale educated and currently spending his winnings on some barge contraption that meets ships in port to siphon off their smokestack emissions while they're idling there. As an interview partner he comes across halting and a little nerdy.

But then the conversation last night turned to the mental crisis we've all been enduring in this country since the emergence of DJT, and how we find ways to respond. Norton and Colbert are both apparently big Walt Whitman fans, and talked about how Whitman's poetry can be a source of perspective as he worked through his own national crisis on the eve of the Civil War. This in turn led to Norton's declamation of an excerpt from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, written in 1856. It's a long poem, so Norton selected an excerpt that captured both the joy of life in New York City and the notion that we all, over generations, share the highs and lows, good and evil, sunshine and shadow, in a way that makes Whitman and those folks jostling past him on the streets of Manhattan and my neighbors and me here today, part of a greater whole.

It's a short watch, but a good one.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1686435822523263

What a gift to Peggy and me. And perhaps to you.