Free The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson

he said. His son persisted: “Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of use?” And then Rorty blurted out that, yes, poetry had been of use. When asked which poems in particular, he quoted two old “chestnuts” that he had “dredged up” from memory and been “oddly cheered by.” One, from Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:
    We thank with brief thanksgiving
    Whatever gods may be
    That no life lives for ever;
    That dead men rise up never;
    That even the weariest river
    Winds somewhere safe to sea.
    and the other, from Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:
    Nature I loved, and next to nature, Art;
    I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
    It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
    Rorty said he found comfort “in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers,” and added, “I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythmwere needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.”
    Rorty confessed that he wished he had spent more of his life with verse. “This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived life more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. [Remember Oscar Miłosz described poetry as “a companion of man since his beginnings.”] Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verse.” 29

CONCLUSION
    The Central Sane Activity
    S hortly before Christmas 1996, the author Salman Rushdie was still in hiding, driving south from Sydney with his girlfriend and son to spend the holiday with the novelist Rodney Hall. Rushdie had been in Australia, under guard, to publicize a book and had decided to stay on. His police-protection team had said it was safe because no one would know he was staying on. So they withdrew, though by then, despite the hit squads not having found Rushdie, they had found his Italian translator and his Norwegian publisher, who had been attacked and injured, and his Japanese translator, who had been murdered.
    About halfway through their journey, as Rushdie and his party were passing through the small town of Milton, the tape they had been listening to (Homer’s Iliad ) came to an end and Rushdie, who was at the wheel of the rental car, took his eye off the road for a “fraction” of a second to press the eject button. At that very moment an enormous articulated truck swung out of a side road. There was an equally enormous tearing sound, “the horrible death-noise of metal on metal,” as the truck’s cab hit the driver’s door, crumpling it inward. The car wasn’t dragged under the truck, as it might well have been, but bounced off a wheel and across the road, hard against a tree. The windshield was smashed and the driver’s door wedged shut, but the three occupants were largely unhurt—Rushdie himself the most badly, with a fractured arm.
    Milton had a small medical facility and an ambulance was quickly brought. When the ambulance men arrived, they stopped and stared. One of them said, “Excuse me, mate, but are you Salman Rushdie?” Right then he didn’t want to be—he wanted to be an anonymous person receivingmedical treatment—but he admitted that, yes, he was. “Oh, okay, mate, now this is probably a terrible time to ask, but could I get an autograph?”
    Across the road, the shocked truck driver wasn’t getting any better treatment. The police had