If You Want Your Life To Count Poem by gershon hepner

IF YOU WANT YOUR LIFE TO COUNT


If you want your life to count,
trying hard to make a mark
on history, what is the amount
you have to pay to what is dark
in order to change it to light?
I'll tell you what the price must be.
It's confidence that you are right,
with perfect sight that helps you see
what in the darkness other men
can't see as well as you. You use
this very special acumen
to find in darkness all the clues
that have been left around, and scattered
when the lights went out, and in
the chaos cosmically were shattered
in a process some call sin,
but basically is just an error
made by God and man together.
The price you pay for this is terror
of the dark, and wondering whether
the price can ever be enough,
but when it fully has been paid,
remember life is very tough
for those who think. Don't be dismayed
by failure. Though your costs wont be
returned, you should be satisfied
that you at least have tried to see
what thoughts in darkness choose to hide.
It's likely you won't make the mark
for which you aim, If you're denied
this goal and don't become a spark,
the very fact that you have tried
should leave you satisfied. To reach
your goal of course should be your aim,
and making in the dark a breach
however small may light a flame.

Dara Horn reviews Cynthia Ozick's novel, Foreign Bodies (Forward,10/20/10) :

Cynthia Ozick is one of America's greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition. From ancient times, the desire to change the world, or even merely to change one's life, was what distinguished Israel from other nations. But Ozick understands that ambition as we now know it is actually a form of idolatry, a worshipping of fame and approval over integrity. What makes her work not merely breathtaking, but also necessary, is her awareness of ambition's opposite: freedom….
The reader enters this morass through Bea Nightingale (nee Nachtigall) , a middle-aged American Jewish teacher whose rich brother sends her to Paris to convince his wastrel son, Julian, to return home. Characters like Bea are conventionally used in fiction to represent lost potential. Childless, Bea is divorced from a composer who left her for Hollywood — and while she excels in teaching, her status as an English teacher at a vocational high school is comically low. But the events that follow ultimately force the question of what it means for a life to have significance. "I want to make my mark, " a naive and poetically inclined Bea had told her husband, and Ozick dissects it: "The trouble with liking poetry… was that it inflamed you, it made you want your life on this round earth to count…. A mark, a mark, a dent in history, a leaving — even (even!) if not her own."….
As Bea unburdens herself from her own encounter with artistic ambition (embodied by her talented and cruel ex-husband) , her calculated choices affect the other characters in profound, unexpected and completely plausible ways, all pointing to the questions of how and why we want more than life offers us — questions that are answered, vividly and wonderfully, in the surprising and perfect symmetry that ends the story. It's the kind of book you want to read twice.
Ozick's oeuvre is driven by the idea of ambition, and the same might be said of Ozick herself. She has frequently written about how artists, including herself, experience envy for those more popular. The countless accolades she has received often seem not to have sated her hunger for wider acclaim — or, more important, her yearning for a culture in which an enduring talent like hers would be as lauded as the latest flash in the pan. But in this novel, one can see, for the first time in Ozick's fiction, the ultimate and absolute victory of personal devotion over personal ambition. Near the novel's end, Bea arrives at a simple revelation: "She thought: How hard it is to change one's life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others."
As one of the many readers whose life has been indelibly marked by Ozick's words, I can only agree.

4/29/12 #10,037