Consciousness Bemoaned in “Aubade” by Philip Larkin (Part 1)

In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails. 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More bleak, Philip Larkin's poem Aubade seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one, on behalf of self love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us both to workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality as a consequence. Life is harder to live in the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Today we discuss whether life and love can be reconciled with human self consciousness and all that it entails. This is Wes Alwan and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to subtext. Okay, so today we are discussing Philip Larkin's Aubade. I looked up the pronunciation. I don't think I said that. I don't think I pronounced it correctly when we announced it on the last episode. I think I might have thought it was obeyed. Anyway, it's Aubade. 2:03 Erin: That is how it's spelled. 2:04 Wes: Yeah, it is French. Technically. I've had some French and should know better. But anyway, so it's interesting because this is a form of poem that is meant to be a kind of love song between lovers separating at dawn. And I think it has its origins in troubadours. Provencal, right? Courtly love. John Donne, who we've done before on this podcast, has a famous example called the Sun Rising, which maybe we could point to some of the elements of that by way of comparison. This poem is an interesting twist on the aubade because it in the typical. So I guess we should say, what does a typical aubade do? Lovers have spent the night together, they're parting in the morning. And the aubade addresses what specifically about the parting? I guess it could be any aspect of it. 3:05 Erin: Well, it's regretful and it's a love poem. There's regret about leaving the lover. So I think it has a couple of mixed emotions, typically. 3:15 Wes: And in the John Donne's poem, there's an element of defiance which is pretty typical of him. So the poem starts with busy old fool, unruly sun, why dost thou thus? It's not the first inanimate object that he's insulted as if it were a person. And then the way it ends is with she's all states and all princes I, nothing else is. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, and that the world's contracted thus. Thine age asks ease. And since thy duties be to warm the world that's done in warming us, shine here to us. And thou art everywhere. This bed thy center is these walls, thy sphere. So the world, in a sense, revolves around the lovers and the sun, which is the thing, right, that's interfering with the couple and is the cause of them having to part, is defeated in a sense. So I guess it doesn't have to all be regret. It can be some element of defiance there, or turning it around on the villain. In this case, the sun who's causing the parting. 4:24 Erin: The parting is put off for now. They never quite part. I don't know if this is like full aubade, because eventually he invites the sun in, in a sense, but they still haven't gotten out of bed. The sun rising part, too. The Sunne rising up after bed. 4:42 Wes: The Sunne rising. Yeah. It is spelled S U N N 4:46 Erin: E. I know, it's. Yeah. 4:51 Wes: All right. So do you know of any other famous examples? 4:55 Erin: This is the one I always think of. 4:57 Wes: Yeah, I think of that. And I think of this Larkin poem, which is interesting in that it seems not to have anything to do with lovers parting at dawn. Why is this an aubade? And what is he doing here? 5:08 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking a little bit about this. Like, the dawn kind of breaks during the poem. The anticipation of the dawn occurs in line three, but it hasn't actually happened yet. So it's sort of pre dawn. The trope seems to be inverted where he's. 5:27 Wes: So he's mentioning work. So the reason the villain is the sun, or it's having to go to work, or it's whatever it is that there's a kind of coupling that happens at night in the sense it's not just sex, but it's the sleeping next to each other the whole night. And I guess. Right. That's really. If you had to count up the hours that a couple spends with each Other, the majority of it would be while they're sleeping, because otherwise they're out doing. Other people have to go to work. And so work. The poem starts with the concept of work. So it's apt. It's not completely irrelevant to the aubade. And that's the subject, but it doesn't explicitly mention the idea that work is interfering with love. 6:15 Erin: Yeah, well, I mean, I think work here will come to have a couple different valences. I mean, I'm thinking about the fact that the lover that he's with, if you will, in this poem is death, or thoughts of death, or the reality that's really always there. Right. And then when dawn comes, the curtains are drawn on those thoughts of death as his actual literal curtains open up and let in the light and obscure the reality of death that haunts him. So in that sense, the lover is death, as I said, but also the poem itself. And this idea of maybe where art fits into work or where the very action of writing this poem fits into the schema that Larkin is introducing here is itself maybe sort of performing an aubade quality, like the very meditation in poetic form is perhaps something like the preoccupation with the lover that is actually keeping the thoughts of death at bay, or at least sort of containing them, which is a bit twisted around. Maybe that doesn't quite work. But I was just thinking a lot about, if not the form of the poem, then the sort of action of writing the poem in the face of what the content of the poem is telling us to do, and whether or not the poem therefore performs a kind of lover function or this idea of, like, whether he's spending the night with the poem or writing the poem rather than with a lover. I know it took him. I think it took him several years to write this poem, but I think that because it seems to unfold in real time or it dramatizes a particular set of moments, I wonder if the poem, therefore, is sort of taking the place of the lover. 8:00 Wes: Yeah, that's a very good point. The poem is taking the place of a lover, or are you suggesting it's to an unnamed, unmentioned lover? When you said the lover, certainly the former lover is. Death is important, but go ahead. Sorry. 8:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So definitely, I think this is Larkin at his most alone. So definitely the poem in the place of a lover in the role of a lover. The idea that he's wiling away his hours writing this poem rather than sleeping with someone. 8:38 Wes: Okay, right. Right. That's another good thing to keep in mind. So we can think of death as the lover. We can think of the poem itself because it's what he's spent his time doing overnight. Is that the idea? All right, so we have two candidates. It occurs to me that originally, the aubade is a song sung by a departing lover to a woman who's sleeping. So it doesn't have to be about that circumstance. It could be anything. I mean, I think it's meant to be evocative of dawn in some way, but I don't know enough about these actual songs of the Middle Ages. There's. Apparently, there's a book by. And I got this off of Wikipedia, but by Gale Sigal called Erotic Dawn Songs of the Middle Ages, voicing the lyric lady. 9:28 Erin: Oh, yeah, I have it. It's right on my shelf. 9:31 Wes: There's enough of these to have a whole book about that. So I don't. You know, it'd be interesting to know what the content of these songs is and how it varies and the extent to which they're on the nose or they might make creative departures in the way that Larkin does. But, yeah, so I like this idea of. So I think we talked about death as the lover or the poem itself as the lover. And then it's possible the poem is. Maybe this won't make sense once we get into the analysis, but it's possible that this would be something that he's writing to a human lover. Okay, should we start going stanza by stanza? 10:12 Erin: Sure, yeah. Do you want me to read one stanza at a time or. 10:15 Wes: Yeah, let's do that, I think. 10:17 Erin: Okay. So here's the first stanza. I work all day and get half drunk at night Waking at four to soundless dark I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light Till then I see what's really always there Unresting death A whole day nearer now making all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die Arid interrogation. Yet the dread of dying and being dead flashes afresh to hold and horrify. 10:50 Wes: Really interesting irony here in the sense that light is going to be evocative of death. You might think that going to sleep in the dark and the dark itself would be the thing that is, strictly speaking, evocative of dying and death. But here it's actually the light coming in around the curtain edges and the transition from night into morning that is evocative of death. 11:19 Erin: Yeah, I think that transition idea is a really interesting one because it's the thing he's anticipating. So right now he's in the dark room occupied with these thoughts of death, the light coming in, or, you know, he's anticipating that the light is going to come in and obscure this vision that he has. So there's something about him being in this dark room with the curtains over it that he's sort of entombed right now. And then the light is going to come in, open up the tomb and distract him from the thoughts of death. But I was thinking a lot about that sort of, you know, that transitional idea that you're getting at, where. So there's something, you know, a bit reversed about this because we begin with him in the room. You know, it seems like his sort of normal state, his regular operating system is, you know, lying and thinking about death. And the intrusion of the day is this sort of false thing, the. That comes in and obscures those thoughts for a while. But, you know, he implies that these are always kind of lingering at the edges of his field of vision, even when he's not in bed, mulling this stuff over. So I was thinking a lot about the idea of the day as the distraction from this sort of regular operating system, of the speaker, of thinking about death all the time and how that's kind of. Maybe it flips our usual expectations. And also thinking about this idea of him being dead or in a kind of faux death, lying in this bed, in this dark room and then rising up into a kind of life during the day. It seems also to flip the expectation that death is something that waits for us at the end. It's like a state that he's always in that he's just taking a break from temporarily. 13:05 Wes: I think that's a good point. It's the. So the sense in which day is evocative of death is just the sense in which it is a timekeeper. Here's another repetition. Here's another day. And I am one day closer to death. And death is inevitable. So this transition period, if it were all day or all night, if all of our existence were confined, if there weren't the cyclical event to remind us and to parse out time in this way, then obviously we would still have clocks and watches. But the timekeeping is kind of embedded in nature. Whereas the sun rising, one might think it would be a source of optimism and hope. And look, here's a whole new day ahead of me. One can always look at it as just another tick of the clock and look at it as an indication that one's future is contracting, not expanding, that time is running out. 14:09 Erin: Yeah, this first line, I'm really Intrigued by. Because it sort of starts with this idea of being anesthetized. That the workaday world is exhausting enough or onerous enough that the speaker needs to get half drunk in order to sort of deal with the stress of the day. So he's in this state at the beginning of the poem. Because, as often happens when you drink too much, you wake up in the middle of the night. So these thoughts are intruding after. 14:41 Wes: Really. I've never experienced. 14:42 Erin: Right after a day of actually taking the waking world, if you will, quite seriously and actually needing to induce a kind of, you know, anesthetized, deadened state in order to deal with the oppression of reality. So that, as a kind of setup, is just a really interesting idea to me because it seems to fly in the face of what he'll later say he's afraid of, which is this idea of being anesthetized and never waking up. Which is something a bit different from taking the edge off of your day. But I still think that there's this, you know, courting, if you will. He seems to fall pretty definitively on the side of believing that waking life is kind of a lie and that it's all a farce and a charade and we're all going to die. But I think in terms of the way that he lives his life, the little glimpse that we get into how his days normally go in this first line, there's something a bit more complex, I think, happening there. 15:44 Wes: Yeah, we're going to learn that part of the problem is that time is being wasted. And that's one of the ways in which death is invading life. Life is not being fully lived. There's a lot of similarities, I think, to. Well, conceptually at least, to the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock being anesthetized and the idea of time being wasted and passivity, which is an interesting way to think of work. But I wanted to say this first line is great. Right. It's the kind of line where. Okay, yeah. I'm almost guarantee to read the rest of the poem. And that's not just because it has the word drunk in it. 16:29 Erin: I just love those drinking poems. 16:32 Wes: I love the symmetry of the first eight syllables. So you have. It's. Before we get to syllables 9 and 10, which evokes the concept of night. It's just, I work all day and get half drunk. Very balanced. Work corresponds to drunk. All is. Corresponds to half. As if there's something. Drunkness is a transmutation of work. And allness has become Half ness. And then the concept of night is introduced after that and then you get this. So it becomes a triad work, drunk night. And then in the next line it's wake, dark stare. In the next line it's time, edges light, and so on and so forth. So I find that, like you, very intriguing from the beginning. 17:24 Erin: Yeah, that's great. Just maybe another note on the form. That first line too is like a perfect iambic pentameter. And a lot of the poem is pretty regular except for the. So there are 10 line stanzas, but in the eighth line it's a little shorter. I think it goes down in the last stanza to just a five syllable line. In this first stanza it's a seven syllable line, so it loses a foot or two feet. And the rhyme scheme here I was pretty intrigued by. So it's A, B, A, B, C, C, D, E, E, D. I wanted to see, and it's not, unfortunately, I wanted to see if it was the same 10 line stanza that Keats uses in his odes. But that's a different one. That's more, you know, that's that kind of like mini sonnet that he worked out with the abab quatrain and then the cdecde. I think we discussed that in our episodes on his odes. So this one has a quatrain in the beginning and then a sort of like joint in the middle with the C rhymes and then another quatrain at the end, this time one in a more Italian rhyme scheme with the outside rhymes and inside rhymes within that rather than the interspersed ones of the. Of the English sonnet or the English quatrain at the beginning. So there's a kind of, I think, balance there too, that maybe you're suggesting happens in the first line, which I really like. You know, maybe there's something like that happening in the form of the poem as well, where it's a sort of equation almost being set up with the two Cs and something's parallel, but also gets a little bit twisted in the back four of the stanza. 19:07 Wes: Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, thanks for that. I was curious about what you thought about the form. So when you say something twisted, what do you mean? 19:16 Erin: Just a bit of a transposition or a bit of a repositioning of things or reconstituting of things. Maybe that dawn that happens in the poem that recontextualizes one's middle of the night musings. The C rhymes are kind of like maybe the dawn or the transition point in the middle of the Stanza. And then things look a little bit different once the dawn has actually broken and you're into the flow of things and getting work done, and you start to forget what you were thinking about the previous night. So, though it's always there, as he says, things just take a different shape or have a different kind of tone to them during the day. I don't know. I mean, this is really meta. I don't know if I believe it, but if I had to give a. A reading of why he chose this form, that would be my best guess. 20:10 Wes: So it's like a turning point in a sonnet. 20:13 Erin: Yeah, yeah, a bit of that. 20:14 Wes: And this is. It introduces the concept of the. 20:16 Erin: Right, which seems strange to say because it's, you know, the Volta doesn't necessarily occur. The couplet rhyme in, say, Shakespearean sonnet, of course, would come at the end. It's like the button at the end of the sonnet. Right. And so the Volta usually just occurs, you know, between quatrains, somewhere in the middle. So here it's strange to associate it with a couplet rhyme, but I do think it kind of has that effect because it has these two ideas getting really close to each other in a way that no other words in the poem really kind of ping off of each other, like those two in the middle. So there's a heightened sense maybe of realization, like a dawning realization that you end up with these two words that ping right next to each other smack in the middle of the stanza. 21:06 Wes: And it's there that. So death is introduced, and it's unresting death, which is interesting because we associate death with being at rest. But death in this case is dynamic, and it's represented by the cycle of days and nights. Again, by the unfolding of time. Not just a ceasing to be, but that's something that can be within life as a timekeeping, and then we'll see as a form of waste. So unresting death a whole day nearer now, making all thought impossible. 21:45 Erin: Yeah, and let me tell you more about that in the next four stanzas. 21:49 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. So the idea is that death, because death hangs over us, we can't think straight because death is hanging over us. And there's, of course there is. Really, there is something to that. Fear of death arguably plays a huge role in human psychology and including our crazy behavior, our insane behavior. And so, for instance, if we identify with a group, say, with a nation, say we're a hardcore nationalist, there's a sense in which the nation is deathless. And that by virtue of that identification, I can enjoy a little bit of immortality from that. And, in fact, that's so potent a thought that I might even be willing to die for my country. I might even be willing to die in some literal sense for immortality in this fantasized sense. So if we think that fear of death is part of what drives that sort of behavior, including, paradoxically, the willingness to die and willingness to kill oneself, we can see how plausible this idea is that the thought of death is something that interferes with our thinking on a regular basis and therefore introduces a deathlike wrinkle into our thought. So it's not just that time is wasted, it's that the thought of death interferes with our minds in some fundamental way, therefore depriving us of life in its fullest sense. 23:27 Erin: Yeah, I really like this idea, though, that death is unresting, that he's had his sleep interrupted. But, you know, death is this force that doesn't need to sleep. It's always, you know, it's kind of like a supervillain or something that is just, you know, always lingering there. I mean, I think you're pointing to things about this poem, as you always do, that I hadn't considered before, but I guess I kind of thought that unresting death was, I don't know, maybe a little bit funny. And certainly the idea of it being a whole day nearer now is just. I also thought was kind of. Kind of funny. I'm not sure why. You know, it's a little bit like, yep, here we go. One day closer to death. I put a smiley face next to that line in my notes. But maybe I'm reading this wrong. And maybe, too, in what we're pointing to with this idea of all thought is impossible, and how that does come with a qualifier, but it's also kind of. That statement is itself contradicted by the poem. Maybe there's something a little bit winking in parts of the poem, too. I don't know if you feel that. 24:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely. I think the tone of the poem, there's something humorous to it. Is that. What am I capturing? 24:38 Erin: Yes. Yeah, definitely. 24:41 Wes: Yeah. Just the beginning line. I work all day and get half drunk at night. It sounds like. Almost like a drinking song. You know, a drinking song or a. Right. It sounds like something you would. You would have a stein at a beer hall and you'd all be singing together with your buddies. What did you say? 24:56 Erin: I said it's actually like a blues song, right? 24:59 Wes: Mm. Yeah. Singing. 25:01 Erin: I Work all day and get half drunk at night. You know, like, there you go. That's my bad impression of a blues singer. Sorry. 25:08 Wes: This could be. Yeah, this. This whole thing could be turned into a bluesong. 25:12 Erin: Well, actually, I was thinking in line 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. These stanzas are too long. 6 to 7. When he says again, another. Another thing I find kind of funny, all thought impossible, but how and where and when I shall myself die. You know, the most fascinating thing about Larkin to me is the fact that he was a jazz critic. And, you know, immediately I think of the Rodgers and Hart song, where or when, which is a great jazz standard. And at the end of the song, the lyrics go. And so it seems that we have met before and laughed before and loved before, but who knows where or when? I mean, you know, it's a very, very famous song. And so there was something a little bit of like an earworm creeping into those lines, like something sort of quoted in a. In a jazz riff, quoting another, you know, the melody of another song in one's own improvisation. I just wanted to point out, too, since we were talking a little bit about the form, that, you know, this first stanza is really so regular. I mean, almost all of the lines in this stanza are end stopped, except for how and dread, they're all. And so there's something a little bit suspended, you know, after each of those words. But, you know, the regularity of the completed thoughts at the end of each line. And then the single syllable rhymes, which are quite simple. I mean, night and light now, and how. Except for the last word, horrify, which is obviously three syllables, there's a kind of just plodding sort of death knell quality to the end of the. You know, it'll get complicated as the poem goes on and starts to, I don't know, advance some more sophisticated syntax and things like that. That sort of plodding regularity at the beginning I think, really increases this sense of maybe a little bit foreboding, but also kind of inevitability. The sort of repetitious Groundhog Day kind of quality of what he's about to wake up to. 27:14 Wes: Interesting. What do you make of arid interrogation? I find that really interesting because it's all thought is impossible because of death, except for thoughts about my own death. And then in the next line, that constitutes a form of interrogation, and then one that's arid, you know, which I guess we would associate with the desiccation of a dead body. But it's as if death itself interrogates us by making us aware of our own mortality. 27:48 Erin: Yeah, I like that idea of death interrogating you. I was thinking about this idea that I suppose the interrogation is arid not just because a question posed to death is fruitless because death can't answer, but also that the question is actually one posed to oneself, which is, I think what you're getting at. Death is kind of addressed throughout the poem or spoken of as kind of an outside force. It inhabits his room with him. And you know, it's kind of like you almost get this the Grim Reaper image. Like he's just sitting in the corner, you know, having a Diet Coke, waiting for something, some opportunity to strike. But it's not really a, you know, how can we put that? A positive force, shall we say, that acts on someone. It's more like the absence of something. So there's this negativity and it's expressed in or through or on or however you want to put it, one's body. So that there's something kind of self defeated or like a mirror that you can't quite look into, or something circular about it. So that's how I was reading the aridity there. 28:58 Wes: Yeah, no, I think that's right as well. And I think, yeah, what arid is saying is, yeah, it's a futile. It's futile. I think your reading is actually better now that I think about it. The interrogation involves reflection on the thought of dying. There's no way to resolve that in some satisfactory way. One can't think one's way through it and become comfortable with it. So the dread, as he says in the end, flashes afresh to hold and horrify. And I think we can associate flashes with the sun and with consciousness. And again, consciousness should be in a way the opposite of death. But instead of it being the opposite, something simply opposed to death. It's something that stuns and horrifies and keeps us from thinking and keeps us from living our life fully. It will turn out, wastes our time. And just to bring us back to the way we began the discussion, I guess the comparison here, or the point of contrast with a typical Obad is here the sun and work and waking up interferes. Instead of interfering with love per se or with a couple, it interferes with something more fundamental, with one's relationship to oneself, with one's ability to think, with one's ability to live fully. Something like that. 30:30 Erin: I like that. And I like what you said about this idea of flashes afresh. You're putting me in mind of the climactic scene of Rear Window when the Raymond Burr character comes to Jimmy Stewart's door and he has the flashbulbs that he uses to blind Raymond Burr to keep him from killing him. So there's this flash that blots out, as you're saying, so the light of truth, shall we say that these flashes represent, is contrasted actually with the light of the sun. And I think it's odd that the truth is something that does blot out or sort of temporarily suspend other considerations with its force or terror or whatever you want to say. It's interesting that this realization and truth I think of as something sort of sobering. And instead it seems here to be yoked with such strong emotions that we can't quite call it a rational kind of realization or. Or truth, even though it is fundamentally. It comes loaded with so much sort of histrionic emotion. I think I was thinking actually a lot about the last two lines of these stanzas and how they're not really teased out here, but I think of the fear of dying and the fear of being dead as two really distinct fears. I was thinking, too, about the uses of. And in these last few lines, how these thoughts yoked together. So hold and Horrify, I think, are the two most interesting. I mean, hold seems to suggest a preoccupation, but also a kind of stunned inaction in the face of death, maybe, which seems to kind of like rehearse death in its operation. Like if you're just held still by something, you're sort of right. Like almost performing kind of momentary death by being still and not moving and not acting. Whereas Horrify is really different. This I think of as being kind of histrionic. And I'm not sure if thoughts of death are really capable of horrifying. I mean, it's difficult to say, but I suppose the order of hold and horrify maybe reverses the expected response to the two states in the line above. So that if we take hold and horrify as being listed, you know, respectively, we have dread of dying as what holds us, and being dead is what horrifies us. And I guess I was just thinking, you know, those two fears for me are very distinct because I think the fear of dying might involve something like, you know, imagining a kind of gruesome or painful death, and that I think of as being far more horrific than maybe the state of being dead. 33:13 Wes: Yeah, very good point. 33:14 Erin: On the other hand, you know, there's a decomposing corpse involved, so maybe I should be more horrified, you Know, the decay of the body. But I suppose, like, being dead doesn't really call up those, you know, vivid images of a decomposing corpse. So I don't know, I just. I was really interested in whether or not my reactions to death are the sort of, like Larkin. Meet the Larkin standard of, you know, human reaction. Normal human reaction. 33:41 Wes: Yeah, that's a very good point, because fear of dying and fear of the process of dying and whether violently or by disease or just by time doing its thing. And then there's the fear of what follows and the nothing, which is basically, by implication here, it's just a nothingness. So in the end, he'll address this idea that one might be comforted by an Epicurean idea that, you know, how can we fear non existence when there will be no one around to experience non existence? Right. It's a famous paradox introduced by Epicurus to suggest that we should be reassured. And then the other option is a Christian option to believe that in an afterlife that things actually go on. Which is interesting in light of the fact that Christianity and Epicureanism were considered to be diametrically opposed to the extent that Epicurus, in a way, was suppressed by the Church and didn't become a thing again until the Renaissance and then had a big. His doctrines had a big influence in the advent of modern science. But. Yeah, so I think that's a very good point because it's foreshadowing the reflection at the end of the poem concerning what it is we're horrified by and how it is we might be comforted in the face of that horror and whether there's something paradoxical in being horrified by nothingness when we'll never get to actually experience it per se. Can we be horrified by something we'll never actually experience? Should we? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. 35:18 Erin: Well, you know, I'm thinking about that in relation to the, you know, what happens over the stanza break, actually, because throughout this poem, maybe, you know, you're pointing me to this idea that perhaps he can't really see the thing that he's trying to look at. The abstractions throughout the poem are kind of, you know, I mean, death is itself a kind of abstraction unless we're actually, you know, looking at, you know, a dead body. You know, given a vivid image of this in the poem, he's talking mostly about mental states and doing so with. Mostly with. With words that are abstractions. So there's a sense at which you can't quite directly look at the thing, both because it's a Bit impossible to do. And because it's too difficult to look at. Or even the emotions that he's describing, feeling in response to kind of getting a glimpse are distancing mechanism. But I think something happens there where he's, you know, in the transition. We have this flashes afresh to hold and horrify. And then he has it both ways over the stanza break. Where at once the flash of realization of death makes him consider with dread the prospect of dying. And it also makes the mind go blank at the same time the thought, as soon as it occurs is pushed away. 36:37 Wes: Yeah, I mean death is something that we can't imagine what it is exactly. If we don't believe in an afterlife, we can't imagine what a complete cessation of consciousness forever would mean. And so it's something without a full content that nevertheless horrifies us. We can't conceptualize it. And there's a blankness to it. And so he'll say the mind in the next stanza. The mind blanks at the glare as if it's the sun, right, that's blinding us again. Instead of the sun shedding light on a world and facilitating consciousness and therefore facilitating aliveness. It becomes a. A kind of glare that prevents. That interferes with our thinking and our living and therefore brings death into waking life. In that way we waste our time. We are prevented from thinking, we are prevented from living fully. And so in a way the way we. We don't know death conceptually, but we just know it procedurally in a sense. Or we know it through the effect of the fear on our. On our day to day life. I think here Freud's death drive right through the repetition of say self destructive acts or things or behaviors that aren't really constructive. Our behavior can kind of have an undead zombie like quality to it. We're not in charge. We do things because of some past trauma that has a hold on us and we can't remember. Part of the. The way trauma functions is that we can't fully remember it. We remember it by acting it. Like we don't remember it as a content. It only comes out in action and only comes out in repetition. So whatever the trauma was is symbolically repeated in an action and that's the only way we know it. And so the same thing with death per se. We know it by wasting time, by having our thought interfered with. And on Larkin's or on the account in this poem, it seems to be work itself, which one might think of as like love, right? Those are the two big things that people go into therapy for and the two big parts of life. One might think work is something in which love plays a role and work is paradigmatically constructive. We're making things and we're making a living, right? We're making life, not death, and that it's an integral and an important part in what it means to live a good life. But the conception that we're of work at work here is one in which it's just this zombie like, pointless thing that one does repetitively and therefore is a component of death in life, let's say. 39:27 Erin: Yeah, I think that's a really great point. I think this is a good place to stop for now. And next time we'll continue talking about Aubade and we'll pick up right here at the beginning of the second stanza and maybe we'll go through the rest of the poem with a slightly we'll make an empty promise, perhaps an empty promise of slightly greater speed, but knowing us, it'll be a while. 39:53 Wes: One hour per stanza. 39:54 Erin: There you go. All right, thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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