Stranger on Earth

Almost half a lifetime went by between the compositions of “When You Are Old” and “Politics,” and yet it is startlingly clear from the diction of both poems that their writer, whose focus might have shifted from the personal to the political, was as preoccupied with the subject of (lost) youth in his last days as when he was in his thirties.   When You Are Old (from The Rose , 1893) When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. In “When You Are Old,” the speaker is addressing a wo...

The psychological and intellectual preoccupations of the modern man have never been more confounding since the arrival of Kierkegaardian Existentialism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, there is the global village which brings all of us together but ensures that our differences keep us apart; there is the Internet that has transformed the world into a giant family, making us believe in the idealism of “six degrees of separation,” and yet we can feel desolate among 7 billion people and hunger for intimacy; there is the freedom of being an individual, of making your decisions based on your wants and needs, but you cannot seem to work out what it is you want or need. Modern living is mined with these frustrating challenges. The purpose of this piece is to look briefly at four landmark literary works – Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice , Franz Kafka’s The Trial , J.M.G. Le Clézio’s The Interrogation , Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood  – and convince the reader tha...