Marcia's Tumblthru Life

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If you want to know what we think is important, look at how we spend our time. If you want to know what we value, look at how we spend our money. If you want to know what we believe, look at how we live.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poems, Robert Hass makes a similar point in the title poem, which he calls “Time and Materials.” Hass observes that life is a slow and gradual accretion of experiences. The goal, he writes, is..

To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

The implied question to which this poem responds is “What are you doing?” The answer is: falling down and getting up and running and falling and getting up. Making love, making curry, and talking on the phone to friends. Lives are not created in a dramatic instant or even over a spectacular week, like the world according to the book of Genesis. Rather, lives are laid down in layers, a gradual accumulation of actions.

Galen Guengerich in “A Steadiness of Days” (PDF)
All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City, June 1, 2008

Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005