I think it was in my school reader in Melbourne, in the early 1960s, that I first read this verse, which has stayed with me ever since:
“Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife,Throughout the sensual world proclaim,One crowded hour of glorious lifeIs worth an age without a name.”
These legendary lines are from the longer poem “The Call,” by Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, written during the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763 as a call to seize the day, to live life to the fullest; that it was also a call to arms hadn’t then occurred to me.
During my childhood, my nose was invariably in a library book and The Famous Five, and Cherry Ames nurse mysteries overlapped with biographies of composers and artists whose difficult lives fascinated me. They achieved virtual immortality through their music and paintings, despite the years of being blighted by miserable poverty, depleting illness, and daunting family tragedy. Many did not live to reach age 40, among them Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Chopin.
My youthful imagination dwelt on the place of suffering in human existence, romanticizing it as a trigger to achievement in the face of challenge and hardship, viewing it as an essential rite to activate and nurture the insight, sensitivity, and passion necessary to shape special effort and ability into superior accomplishment.
One valued classmate and a cherished teacher at my all-girls Melbourne high school later provided the impetus for more intellectually and emotionally mature reading as I eagerly tackled Andre Gide, Anatole France, Albert Camus, and other French authors in their mother tongue.
While I wholly embraced the beauty and nuance of the French language, these readings were mostly dark and serious and I pretended to understand what the authors were telling me while searching for meaning, which was for me then often as unattainable as when I read postmodern English novels of the time such as The Magus by John Fowles.
But on the journey of self-discovery through the human mind and others’ writings, I always clung to Mordaunt’s pithy verse as a truism, while silently willing that notional single crowded hour of glorious life to be instead a good number of years.
TODAY I SEE these poetic lines reflected in the words of many of our IDF fighters and heroes: in words spoken by dedicated soldiers who knowingly and willingly risk their lives – week after week, month after month – for the sake of our land and people; and in letters written to their families by some soldiers before entering a battle from which they would fail to return.
Ben Zussman's lasting words
One such soldier, 22-year-old IDF Sgt.-Maj. (res.) Ben Zussman who fell in the fighting in Gaza on December 3, had put it partly in his letter: “…Even if something happens to me, I’m not permitting you to sink into sorrow. I had the privilege to fulfill my dream and my mission, and you can be sure that I’m watching you and smiling a huge smile… I’ve always said that if I have to die, I hope it will happen while defending others and our country.”
One needs to tread warily here, for we mortals are not judges of what may be a short, good life; or a long, perhaps forgettable one. Who can say, and who dares to say? And yet… while there may be those who when tragedy strikes are unable in their immediate grief to acknowledge the triumph or intensity and richness of experience that may lie within the shadows of a much-truncated life, we do seem to recognize lives lived that bequeath man’s fine name, and some, while long in unremarkable years, sadly leave no name.
I continue to hold fast to the sentiments in Mordaunt’s verse, driven by the universal pull of a meaningful life, for quality over quantity if both cannot be had, for making the most of the time we have without knowing how long that might be.
These are some of the thoughts that have been jostling in my head lately, as they did a few days ago when I taped an Israeli flag across the width of my Katamonim apartment’s front door. It was a simple way of marking the dawn of the ninth anniversary of my aliyah with my husband Joe, who distressingly missed out (by mere months) on reaching that milestone – for indeed we know not the length of our days.
I honor each aliyah anniversary with gratitude and appreciation in celebration of the privilege of calling Israel, and in particular for me Jerusalem, home. It is a rebirth in our promised land, the date of which has as much right to be recorded for posterity as dates of birth and death, just as the three are etched on David Ben-Gurion’s simple grave in Kibbutz Sde Boker.
Celebrate we must even now, or perhaps especially now, when every Israeli’s cup of joy has been diminished since October 7. In the ensuing chaos and shattering of our very souls, our people rallied and instantly pulled together in an overwhelming war effort – volunteering time, labor, connections, presence, financial aid, a pair of hands to share the load, a shoulder to rest and cry on, and in some instances their own precious lives.
Each of these good, selfless people seized the moment to crowd their hours with throbbing life, largely without regard for any consequences or personal burdens it may have imposed on them.
There’s a neat analogy between life and the now-lost art of writing postcards: in the limited space available on the back of the card we’d start writing with regular-sized letters until realizing we were running out of space when our writing became ever smaller and tighter until it pushed into the side margins at a right angle to try fit in what we wanted to say. So it is with our years, which as we age accelerate away from us as we seek to pack in the yet unachieved.
There’s never enough space; there’s never enough time. It’s how we fill the hours of our lives that differentiates each of us, and together forms and shapes the tapestry of mankind.
The writer was a lawyer in Melbourne before she and her husband Joe made aliyah in 2015 to join their children in Jerusalem. She writes and reads for pleasure and emotional sustenance.