Earlier: Townsman of a Stiller Town—In Memoriam Martin Rojas

(Martin Rojas's writings are on VDARE.com under his pen names: Chris Roberts, Hubert Collins, Gilbert Cavanaugh, Nathan Doyle, and Benjamin Villaroel.)

Rest in peace, Icarus.

Photo: Martin Rojas, 2020, with one of my daughters, all of whom loved him.

Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)
W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.