last words

I read somewhere once that the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel’s last words were "only one man has ever understood me, and he didn't understand me." I have thought about these words from time to time, sometimes with humor, sometimes with pity. Hegel is, for those not in the know, and extremely challenging author. To say that Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover is something of an understatement. To think that no one understood him, might easily have been an understatement. Traditionally it is thought that the “one man” that Hegel refers to is Karl Marx, whose own work was strongly influenced by Hegel’s dialectical method and his analysis of history. However, for some reason, while driving home from work this afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me that more than who, why this statement was made must be important. Were Hegel’s last an observation on his relationship with Marx, or anyone for that matter, or were they instead an observation of his own life, a lament.

Struggling at times, in my relationships at home, at work, and in school I know all too well what Hegel might have been talking about. To quote another author, T. S. Elliott “It is impossible to say just what I mean” is not just a statement of the inadequacy of words, but rather reflects upon the speaker's own inability to reconcile inner world with the outer.

The poem repeatedly emphasizes this frustration, etherized, and stretched thin, spread out like yellow fog; even as it rolls toward some overwhelming question, the universe, like the fog, unfolding, even if the actual destination, like the question, remains unclear. Indeed, we set out designs on the universe, to make sense of the fog, like a prophet "come back to tell you all" only to discover the ultimate failure of such a discourse: "That is not what I meant at all."