Sailing on.
6:09. 26.2˚S. 164.9˚W. 237˚. 16.4k.
19:56. 28.2˚S. 168.5˚W. 240˚. 17.2k.
About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters, how well they understood its human position; how it takes place when someone is eating or opening a window or 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 how 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. Take Brueghel'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.
Musée de Beaux Arts
by WH Auden.
