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Tallis in Wonderland

From Dust to Dust

Raymond Tallis on a lifetime of cleaning.

There can be few poems better known than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life, and few lines of poetry more often quoted (and misquoted) than “Dust thou art, to dust returnest”. The Psalm deserves its place in the collective memory not only because it is beautifully written, but also because it tries to pull off the extraordinary feat of finding reasons for good cheer while directly confronting our transience. Longfellow argues that “We can make our lives sublime/And, departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time”, and by doing so inspire those who follow us.

It is not clear how much consolation is to be had from this thought. Leaving aside the knowledge that our most certain ‘footprint’ will be a carbon one – making the lives of our successors more difficult, or even denying them their share of time – looking to our impact on others’ lives to make sense of our own merely moves the question of life’s meaning on, unanswered.

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