Giving Thanks, Yet Again

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers — and everyone else, too, for that matter.

Dymphna wrote her wrap-up to our Autumn Fundraiser on Tuesday, which amounted to an early Thanksgiving. However, one of the features of our quarterly fundraisers is that donations always continue to trickle in, even after the final wrap-up, making our thankfulness extend through the rest of the week.

A new country may now be added to the list of donors: Luxembourg. As far as I can recall, this is the first gift from Luxembourg we have ever received.

Other latecomers checked in from Australia, Florida, Illinois, Norway, Pennsylvania, and the UK. Once again, our gratitude goes out to all of those who contributed to a happy Thanksgiving here at Schloss Bodissey.

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We’ve pointed out repeatedly over the last few years that our times seems to have a 1938 feel about them. There is a widespread sense that an enormous storm will soon shatter the illusory calm that has prevailed for the past four decades in the Western democracies. It’s impossible to predict exactly when the first lightning bolt will strike, and the crucial moment may not be as clear-cut as the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

As if the demographic crisis, the suppression of civil liberties, the Islamic incursions, and the Iranian nuclear threat weren’t enough, we now face an economic catastrophe that may well destroy the major currencies and wipe out the European Union along with our prosperity.

So the gratitude we feel for all that has been granted us by Providence is tempered by the melancholy sense that all we have now will not last much longer, for 1939 is surely bound to arrive.

With these somber thoughts in mind, we revisit a poem by Louis MacNeice written in the late 1930s. Like the poet, we remain grateful for the sunlight on the garden, while it remains:

The Sunlight on the Garden
by Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.