"A middle-aged man sleeps on his couch. Mere blocks away, two trains collide during rush hour. Twenty-five minutes later, the man is awakened not by the sound of sirens (common in this urban neighborhood) but by a phone ringing. It is his sister, calling from 3,000 miles away. Her stepdaughter, 225 miles north of where the incident took place, has just texted her about the fatal crash.
Time to update W.H. Auden's "Musée Des Beaux Arts"? The middle-aged man dozing on his couch (yes, that's me, recovering from a minor medical procedure) fits with "someone … eating or opening a window or just walking dully along" as less than a mile away at least four people die in a D.C. Metrorail collision. The old masters still have that right. But what they, and Auden, couldn't have anticipated was that at least some of the people turned away "quite leisurely from the disaster" would be Twittering Icarus' fall."
Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940
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