What I was talking about at the beginning
and I've been talking about the whole time
is not one of those subjects I think that you
have as an opinion for a while.
And then, as you pass from one election to another,
you forget about the last one, and you
go on to something else.
There are unresolved subjects that have been there with me
all my life--
it's marvelous not to find answers.
We're so oriented in our thinking
that we think it's a question-and-answer thing.
The question is far more important than the answer.
And to have the question stay for a long time,
the question will teach you more than the answer will.
The answer, in some ways, is a blind alley.
You think you've got there.
And unfortunately, you've never got there.
Or fortunately, fortunately, you never get there.
But these subjects, they've just grown in the course of my life.
They seem to me more crucial, more painful.
I remember 25 years ago being shocked in Oregon when I
was reading at a small college.
And a biologist said to me that we
were losing a species a week.
And it's been some years now that we've been losing
more than a species a minute.
We're losing a species every few seconds.
That's how fast it's going.
Well, this is not something that we can replace.
This is-- it always happened.
Words go out like that.
We're doing the same thing with cultures.
I have the uneasy feeling, and this is very pessimistic.
One has to learn to live with these things, I think.
What we're watching is a form of pure acceleration--
what's behind it?
Where is it leading?
Why it's happening.
We're only part of that.
But it's not straight uphill.
It's a sine curve that the farther it goes,
the steeper the climb and the faster it goes.
And we see that happen.
I mean, our population passed 1 billion
sometime in the early 19th century, now where are we?
Look, that's all happened in 100--
200 years, less than 200 years.
Whether it's reversible or not, I don't know.
But what is reversible is how we feel about it, how we think
about it, how we relate to it.
I think that's important.
If it's on the way out, we want to be on the way out with it.
We want to be aware of it.
We want to be part of it, and not say,
I don't care if the rest of it goes, as long as we stay.
That's no good.
That won't work.
It won't work that way.
Our attitude toward it is important, not just
for ecological reasons.
Not just for saving the planet.
There are so many aspects to that, that we haven't even
addressed yet.
I mean, when people say, oh, we must save the Amazon rainforest
because there are all those medicinal plants in there that
are curing human ailments, and there are lots more
to discover.
Sure, that's true.
So what?
I mean, the other side of that is
how come there are those medicinal plants in the Amazon?
Those plants were there before there were those diseases
to cure.
They're about something much older.
They're about some balance that was being kept.
More important is to find out what that balance was
and to try to restore that.
I think this is a subject that is so enormous.
And whether we solve it or not, the important thing
is to go on trying because it's part of the great privilege
of being alive.
I mean, the great elation of being alive.
The elation of that child, I was seeing the grit,
the grass growing.
And it wasn't just satisfaction, it
made me very happy to see that grass
grow through the flagstones.
And I've seen it on old airports too,
coming up through the [INAUDIBLE],, great.
Let me get the manuscript of the new book that's
coming out in September, and read a few poems from that.
And a few even more recent than that, and that will see us out,
then you can go home and get upset about it.
In the middle of this book, which
is called The Shadow of Sirius, I
want you to think about the title
for a minute Sirius is possibly the brightest
star we know in the universe, at least I've heard it said.
Sirius means the dog star.
There is no shadow of Sirius, of course, except there
is in our imagination.
And there's a center section of the book,
which is full of elegies.
And a lot of people don't seem-- who have read individual ones,
don't seem to realize that they're all about dogs.
I believe the grief for animals is a thing on its own.
I think it's every bit as severe.
The worst grief I've ever felt in my life has been for dogs.
And I've lost my parents.
I don't mean I didn't grieve for them.
I grieve in a different way.
But grief for animals is unbearable and unsayable.
There is no language involved in that.
And I'm not ashamed to--
I feel that animals--
I've learned as much from animals in some ways
as I learned from human beings.
And I'm not in the least bit ashamed.
I feel very privileged to think of at least two,
maybe three animals as really important guides in my life
and how they behaved in particular moments.
We're very lucky when this happens.
So even this poem, people say, well, it must be metaphoric.
But it's not.
This is what it says It was by dark.
"When it is time, I follow the black dog
into the darkness that is the mind of day.
I can see nothing there but the black dog,
the dog I know going ahead of me not looking back.
Oh, it is the black dog I trust now in my turn after the years
when I had all the trust of the black dog.
Through the room, through an age of brightness
and through shadow, on into the blindness
of the black dog, where the rooms of the dark
were already known, and had no fear in them for the black dog,
leading me carefully up the blind stairs."
This is a sort of lullaby elegy called, Good Night.
"Sleep softly my old love, my beauty in the dark.
Night is a dream we have, as you know as you know.
Night is a dream you know an old love in the dark around you
as you go, without end as you know.
In the night where you go, sleep softly,
my old love, without end in the dark,
in the love that you know."