An excursion into the title of yesterday’s posting “Things fall apart”, a wry tale of the misfortunes of daily life, with the following moment, in which a can opener literally falls apart, as its comedic center:
Can openers are difficult for me to operate. But I wrestled with it, and had gotten the can half open when the opener sprung apart, spraying gears and handles and other parts all over the kitchen counter. I then discovered that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again; the can opener had turned into a useless pile of metal and plastic trash.
My title has a distinguished pedigree, in this poetic line from William Butler Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Which then provided the title of the stunning 1958 novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
“The Second Coming”. From Wikipedia:
“The Second Coming” is a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a canonical work of modernist poetry
… The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland.
… Yeats’s cosmology is laid out in his book A Vision, where he explained his views on history and how it informed his poetry. Yeats saw human history as a series of epochs, what he called “gyres.” He saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Things Fall Apart. From Wikipedia:
Things Fall Apart is a 1958 novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is Achebe’s debut novel and was written when he was working at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. The novel was first published in London by Heinemann on 17 June 1958.
The story, which is set in British Nigeria, centers on Okonkwo, a traditional influential leader of the fictional Igbo clan, Umuofia, who opposes colonialism and … Christianity. … Things Fall Apart was considered Achebe’s magnum opus and formed his “African trilogy” with his other novels; No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God.
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