Around 1996, I chose a stanza from the poem The Tyger by William Blake as my email signature: I already blogged in the past about this: The Tyger is back. Here it is:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Here, you can find the full poem.
What fascinated me in that verse was the "fearful symmetry", that emotion a young engineer like me experienced looking closely at living organisms.
I used it for 15 years, dropping it when I moved to the University of Sheffield. In 2018, when I returned to Bologna, the temptation was too strong, and I put it back as part of my email signature.
Today, I am going to replace it. My new signature citation will be:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas, in Collected Poems (1952)
It is the closing verse of a poem Dylan Thomas wrote in the form of a Villanelle, a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The full text can be found here. The sentence "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" closes every other stanza. This reminds me of one of the folk songs I loved most when I was young, Riturnella, in the version of Musica Nova. It is a traditional from Calabria, recovered in the seventies.
But the reason for this change is another. I am entering a time in my life when you are constantly confronted with death. That of your parents, your youth's hero, and your own. It is something new for me; trust me, it is tough. Now, I suddenly understand something I read years ago: "all elders have a baseline of depression". Yes, sure, I can see it now.
You need to fight it; you cannot abandon yourself to it. But how? Well, today, I found a citation to Dylan Thomas's poem, and I had a lamplight moment: considering who I am, the best way is to be pissed off about it. So this is my plan: I do not want to go gentle into that good night; I will rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And since I am still spending half of my life reading and writing emails ( I need to do something about this as well), the best place to remind me of this is my email signature, right?
That's done, and I also added to my daily playlist a good song from Rage Against the Machine.
done. Let's rage.
