Montale and Krishnamurti

It's impossible to think of some people as being in the past.

I can think of Eugenio Montale (1897-1981) as being there, but not J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986).

This impossibility not only points to a lack of imagination,  in cahoots with an ever-changing value system, but to a great sense of regret that I didn't go to hear Krishnamurti lecture under the oak trees in Ojai in the 1970's when I was invited by others and had the chance.

And now my life is spead out all over the place.

O well.

I re-open Montale's "Selected Poems"  (New Directions, 1965) at random and read: "You are devoted to precarious/ sentiments and sediment--blackened/architecture..." from the section 2 of a poem titled "News from Mount Amiata" and translated by Robert Lowell.

That's a far as I can go, though I pomise to come back to the poem at an unspecified time in the future. 

Krishnamurti's "Meditations" (Shambala, 2002) is waiting, somewhere nearby. "Meditation is never prayer. Prayer, supplication, is born of self-pity...This self-pity, so deeply embedded in man, is the root of separation. That which is separate, or thinks itself separate, ever seeking identification with something that is not separate, brings only more division and pain."

That Montale and Krishnamurti are roughly contemporaneous is astonishing, as is the thought that all the treasures are in the past.