Ulysses Redux

Today is my father’s birthday. Had he still been alive, he’d be seventy.

I searched my mind and memory for a poem to post tonight, and, truth be told, came up short. Nothing I could think of seemed to encapsulate the essence of this man, at least the way I remembered him. It seems to me whenever I try to think of my father it appears I examine him looking through a telescope the wrong way.

So I thought it best then to post a section of my favorite poem, “Ulysses,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I posted the climax of the work elsewhere on this blog; here let me post a passage that I’d like to think would have resonated with my father:


I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.


To my father – the man who, whether he knew or not, introduced me to the Science Fiction novel: Brian Aldiss, Alan Dean Foster, Lin Carter, D.D. Chapman and Delores Lehman Tarzan, and, quite possibly, Isaac Asimov …