Had we but world enough, and time

I was rushing this morning from one thing to another and the first line of Marvell's To His Coy Mistress leapt into my head. I had to find the whole thing and read it then and there. How marvellous it is (excuse the pun) - how modern - how funny. Isn't this unbeatable? The grave's a fine and private place,   But none, I think, do there embrace Marvell's message in the poem,  to seize the day and 'sport ... while we may', is not why the first line line popped into my head you understand. I was just thinking how I'd like to hear less of 'time's winged chariot' and have more time to gobble up my own vegetable loves: writing, lying around with a book  ... Oh well, taking a sliver of time to read and think about one excellent poem is a welcome pause in the headlong rush of a Friday morning. I recommend it. Now, better get on... To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell. 1621–1678

HAD we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side	5
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.	10
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,	15
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.	20
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,	25
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:	30
The grave 's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires	35
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.	40
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun	45
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead

Mario Vargas Llosa

... thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.


An extract from Mario Vargas Llosa’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The whole thing is free as a pdf download.


My thanks to UK writer Kathleen Jones for spotting this, and for her thoughtful discussion of it (and more quotes) on her blog. I love this about blogs - there you are on an ordinary day, contemplating walking the dog before heading out the door to work at the bookshop, and suddenly BAM - you find something that sends the brain cells in complex, satisfying loops. 


I don't have time to read the whole thing now, but Kathleen's given me a taste and a link and I can come back to it tonight - with a glass of wine - before American Idol.