{"id":10713,"date":"2025-05-17T16:20:58","date_gmt":"2025-05-17T20:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/marie-howes-spare-stunning-poem-the-maples-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-17T16:20:58","modified_gmt":"2025-05-17T20:20:58","slug":"marie-howes-spare-stunning-poem-the-maples-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/marie-howes-spare-stunning-poem-the-maples-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Marie Howe\u2019s Spare, Stunning Poem \u201cThe Maples\u201d \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cJudging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,\u201d Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature<\/a>. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer \u2014 not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new pope. Only life itself. Only what Seamus Heaney called \u201cyour own secret knowledge,\u201d<\/a> which you may spend your life learning, but which is always whispering to you if you get still enough and quiet enough to discern its voice through the clangor of confusion and the din of shoulds.<\/p>\n

In this sense, Nietzsche was right to caution<\/a> that \u201cno one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.\u201d In another, he was wrong in depicting life as a river you stand on the banks watching and waiting to cross without getting wet. No: You are the water. You are a molecule afloat among all the other molecules of everything else alive, the flow of life living itself through you, an answer complete unto itself.<\/p>\n

This is why I\u2019ll take, over all the world\u2019s philosophy combined, Marie Howe\u2019s spare and stunning poem \u201cThe Maples,\u201d found in her New and Selected Poems<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 that benediction of a book that won her the Pulitzer Prize \u2014 read here by sapling-poet Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy: <\/p>\n