One of Shakespeare’s sonnets begins, “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow.” I don’t know why the line has had such an effect upon me—has stuck in my mind like a musical jingle that will not leave—but it has done for almost as long as I can remember. “Almost,” I wrote: for I can date my acquisition of this line to a sea journey.
My family was travelling home to Canada, in the early 1960s, after living in Pakistan. On my departure from St. Anthony’s School in Lahore, a beloved teacher, a Miss Quinn, had given me an India-paper edition of Shakespeare. (Everyone knew Miss Quinn loved Shakespeare; she would quote him even to kindergartners.) I had been her pet for two years, there was a bond between us, such as can exist only between an old spinster woman and a very young boy. (Today, one must explain that it was not sexual.)
She gave me this book, and said to me something like: “David, I will not see you again. You will grow into a man. If you will keep this book, and read it all your life, you will become wise. Promise me that you will do this; and I promise that as you get older, you will understand it more and more. All the wisdom of the world is in this book. And when you are old you will read Shakespeare, and remember the teacher who loved you.”
The book is long since lost. But I have come to consider all editions of Shakespeare to be gifts from Miss Quinn. And I can remember the inscription in it, because it is still written in my heart. It was in Latin: “Et cognoscetis veritatem,” from the Gospel of John. “And you will know the truth. …”
Which takes us aboard the Cilicia—for this is a romantic memoir. She was a passenger ship of the long-defunct Anchor Line, herself launched in the 1930s, rusting away under fresh paint, on one of her last legs; sailing home from Bombay and Karachi, to Liverpool and Glasgow. (Soon she would be scrap.) If I do not remember, I have reconstructed in memory: trying to read the sonnets of Shakespeare, in my berth at night, and the line from the second sonnet anchoring in my soul.
“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, / Thy youth’s proud livery, so gaz’d on now, / Will be a tatter’d weed …”
Shakespeare the realist; the Shakespeare who delivered, in the foolishly underestimated late romance of Cymbeline, the most extraordinary and memorable cheap pun in the English language: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
Forty years is a long time, in the generations of mayflies, and even in the course of a human life.
I have myself now outlived Shakespeare, by four years.
For well more than 40 years his line has been rattling in my skull, so that every time I have had a fountain pen to test—or a ballpoint, or a typewriter, or a laptop keyboard to tap for the first time—I have written without thinking: “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow.”
It is now forty winters since the moon landing of 1969: an event I could myself once foresee only through the pages of Jules Verne. From the Earth to the Moon, was the title of that book, first published in 1865. Three astronauts in a capsule Verne called the “Columbiad,” are fired through the muzzle of an immensely long cannon, towards the moon from a launch site in Florida.
Verne was remarkably accurate and even prescient in all his rough calculations, but one: his astronauts would have been crushed by the force of acceleration. (The problem could have been solved, but not very easily.)
On my children, or on anyone born since, the amazement of that day in 1969 must be lost. It is impossible for the human mind to unwrite history, or travel back in time. Once something is done, it remains done, and the novelty of it can never be recaptured. Not even Jules Verne would write a novel on time travel (though he toyed with the idea in his early notebooks, as I understand). It is impossible to reverse the arrow of time: and Verne, a man of true common sense, did not sweat the impossible.
Yet the flip side of this is profoundly encouraging, even within the limitations of our world. For the truth is, that if we have done something once, it can be done again.
In this respect I am thinking less of the moon venture, than of everything man has ever accomplished in the line of goodness and beauty and truth.
Nothing we ever did was impossible. Through 40 years, it has seemed to me that our whole civilization has been coming apart. But what has come apart, can be put back together; we have only to find the desire to rebuild.
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