A MODERN AND WORLDLY PERSPECTIVE
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"Do not go gentle into that good night"
Arnold Siegel —November 24, 2014

Dylan Thomas, with insight, urgency and art, forewarns:  “Though wise men at their end know dark is right, / Because their words had forked no lightning they / Do not go gentle into that good night.”

The forces that subject and propel human beings fascinated Thomas, the immensely popular Welsh poet born in 1914. He gave authentic and intense voice to both the weight and contradictory claims of these forces. Indeed, he declared (with poetic license), "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory . . . and my effort is their self-expression.”

Thomas urges an intense engagement with life. Let us not learn too late, and grieve it on its way how bright we may have burned, how rich for contribution are the possibilities that life affords.

And Thomas does not lament life’s end. He celebrates biology—the continuing process of life and death that links us generation to generation. “Dark is right.” Natural. Inevitable. But we rage against the “dying of the light,” or the fact of our finitude, when we feel that our lives have “forked no lightning,” when we feel that we have not fulfilled our unique promise. With gratitude, we can say to Thomas: Consider us forewarned.

What we who study autonomy and life have learned: If we base our unique promise solely on Scoreboard evidence of personal accomplishment or gain, yes, we can point to our good fortune. Yet our ambition for rank and status on (and consuming frustration with) this Scoreboard matrix yields a how-it-might-have-been nagging disappointment. In other words, it's not really fulfilling. Unfulfilled, we have a hard time accepting our finitude.

Unlike the millions of people who live merciless lives, at the effect of poverty, tyranny or disease, we have the opportunity to go to our ultimate destiny exercising the full range of our resourcefulness. We can put our transformable natures and intellect to the open challenge of independence. We are equipped by the ability to think things through. We can project ourselves into the future, sustain our commitment to an authentic expression of our creative gifts and reconcile ourselves to “the dying of the light.”

Life, the flow of existence, the links in the chain, appears as an inviting challenge. Fully subjected to and in union with the forces that permit nothing more than a finite life, we who are students of autonomy and life take up the challenge to go gently into that good night.

The poem (formally referred to as a "villanelle") by Dylan Thomas follows:

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, 1951.

Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, / Because their words had forked no lightning they / Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, / And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, / Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight / Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, / Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. / Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.

Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and the leader of its
Workshops and Advanced Classes.