Poet John Donne, according to the conclusion of Katherine Rundell's biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne:

... wrote poems that take all your sustained focus to untangle them. The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it. In order to do so, you shake yourself out of cliche and out of the constraints of what the world would sell you. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His starting timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don't see him coming.

The difficulty of Donne's work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world's most mercurial resource. The command is in a passage in Donne's sermon: 'Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.' Awake, is Donne's cry. Attention, for Donne, was everything: attention paid to our mortality, and to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us, attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet and mouths. Attention to attention itself, in order to fully appreciate its power: 'Our creatures are our thoughts,' he wrote, 'creatures that are born Giants: that reach from East to West, from earth to Heaven, that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once: my thoughts reach all, comprehend all.' We exceed ourselves: it's thus that a human is super-infinite.

Most of all, for Donne, our attention is owed to one another. Donne's most famous image comes not from his poetry, but from the words he set down in extremis, in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions:

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

On his deathbed, facing down what he imagined to be the end of everything he had known, this was what he most urgently wanted to tell. We, slapdash chaotic humanity, persistently underestimate our effect on other people: it is our necessary lie, but he refused to tell it. In a world so harsh and beautiful, it is from each other that we must find purpose, else there is none to be had:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

There's a characteristic bite in the passage, which stands as both promise and warning: death is coming for you. But they are glorious words. If we could believe them, they would upend the world. They cast our interconnectedness not as a burden but as a great project: our interwoven lives draw their meaning only from each other.

In his hardest days Donne wrote that his mind was a 'sullen weedy lake'. But it was fertile water: in it, things were born. From his prodigious learning, from his lust, from his fear, came work strong enough to ring through the barricade of time. Donne was honest about horror and its place in the task of living, and honest too in his insistence: joy is also a truth. Who else of his peers had been able to hold grotesqueries and delights, death and life so tightly in the same hand?

There's a scientific term, autapomorphic, which denotes a unique characteristic that has evolved in only one species or subspecies. That was him: there are ways of reckoning with the grimly and majestically improbable problem of being alive that exist only because four hundred years ago a boy was born on Bread Street to Elizabeth Donne. John Donne was super-autapomorphic.

Pay attention!

(cf Attention, Attention, Attention (2015-03-03), Attention Means Attention (2019-09-18), John Donne's Commonplace Book (2023-04-19), ...) - ^z- 2023-04-30