Inklings | August Edition

    Well. 

    It’s certainly been a hot minute, hasn’t it? I was gone almost two months, and it’s such a strange feeling to be back, home, doing normal things. 

    For those of you who are completely clueless, I was away for six weeks (and some) at an intensive violin program on the other side of the country, where we performed multiple concerts every week in symphony orchestra, and on top of that I had a (fabulous and amazing and wonderful) quartet with whom I performed and recorded. Our schedule was so packed it was difficult to find time for individual practicing! And yet I loved it. We had the chance to work with world-class performers and conductors, and I’d say it was probably the best summer of my life. 

Isn’t this quote so beautiful?

    (If you are someone I knew there and you’ve somehow stumbled upon this, I just want to say… having such excellent musicians and wonderful people as my friends for six weeks was absolutely incredible and made my time there That Much Better. And made it that much harder to say goodbye. But almost no goodbye is forever—we’ll meet again, and I look forward to the day we do!)

    (Now excuse me while I go practice…)

    Kidding. At least for now. Because it’s August now, and there’s a new Inklings prompt out! This month it’s a scene by the ocean in book or film and you can find Heidi’s original post here.  

    My selection comes from medieval poet Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti LXXV, one of the earliest sonnets written in English. It dates from the mid-1580s and features this sonnet about the poet’s seemingly vain attempt to immortalise his beloved’s name by writing it on the sand at the beach—but when the tide comes in, the name is slowly washed away. 

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

‘Vain man,’ said she, ‘that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And ere my name be wiped out likewise.’

    It’s beautiful, and tragic, and subtly mourning the curse all humanity must experience—that is death. How can love be immortal when no human being is? And yet—and yet. Because we are created in the image of God we are also capable of loving unconditionally—as He does. And that is a love that transcends even death. 

    So is Spenser right, that nothing mortal can, or ought to, be immortalised? Is the narrator vain for attempting to do so? 

    If he was attempting to immortalise something sinful, I would agree. But because he bears a love that transcends even death—I don’t think he is vain. He’s sentimental, a fool even, but it is not an evil to give someone you love a token of that affection, however finite. 

    What thinkest thou, dear reader? (See, Elizabethan English affects me. I can’t read more than two paragraphs without adopting it for mine own self.) Is it wrong to immortalise love in a mortal manner? 

Soli Deo Gloria!

——

Namarië,

Astrya