Here is the first paragraph of an article in the Independent:
Earthquake-battered Beichuan suffered its final indignity yesterday as torrents of muddy water bore down on the ruins of the town. The living have left, but the gushing waters took with them the corpses buried in the rubble; the life savings of the residents who were forced to leave; and official documents, books, letters and photographs that make up a person's memories.
John Carey pointed out that whereas John Keats and Percy Shelley were pre-Darwinian and pre-Freudian poets. Seamus Heaney is one of the most significant post-Freudian and post-Darwinian poets. Whereas in Keats's and Shelley's time, the truth was to be found in looking up to the sky, at skylarks and nightingales. Human thought at that time saw salvation and mystery in the heavens.
But most of Seamus Heaney's work delves into the muck beneath his feet. He writes about stuff that is to him, very commonplace, but to most people digging, butter-churning, and slaughtering animals with bare-hands, are symbols of a bygone and more honest existence.
Heaney explores the miracle of how we all came from the muck, and vividly touches on how destiny might be to get submerged in the muck of ones one making.
Which might also explain why there is some pathology behind my fondness for swimming in dirty rivers.
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