Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

This Cruel Age Has Deflected Me

This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from its course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.
Here in the only city I can claim,
where I could sleepwalk and not lose my way,
how many foreign skylines I can dream,
not to be witnessed through my tears.
And how many verses I have failed to write!
Their secret chorus stalks me
close behind. One day, perhaps,
they'll strangle me.
I know beginnings, I know endings, too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.
And a certain woman
has usurped my place
and bears my rightful name,
leaving a nickname for my use,
with which I've done the best I could.
The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person that I am
I should know at last what envy is.

~Leningrad, 1944

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I've had this feeling, haven't you? The feeling that you've failed to do all that you could or should have done and, at the same time, the realization that, if you could look at your life as an objective observer, you'd probably realize that you were doing pretty well. Some of the best advice that I ever got was to, when considering what to do about something in your life that's bothering you, imagine the honest advice that you'd give to a dear, beloved friend in the same situation. Oddly, it's often different from what you'd say to yourself. It at least provides you with two perspectives, instead of just one.