We call them "pages" -- those rectangular sheets that form a book. At one time, those pages were not infrequently called the "leaves" of a book. Today, we employ that term less often (although we do still use "loose-leaf" notebooks, even in this digital age). And occasionally we might say that a person is "leafing through" a magazine as they browse through its pages.
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John Donne
(1572-1631) |
The employment of the same English word for both the pages of a book and those flat attachments to a tree we call "leaves" proved to be fertile ground for the pen of the early 17th-century poet and essayist John Donne. His prose could at moments be as rich as poetry. And he drew upon the "leaf" metaphor in "Meditation XVII" of his
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. That is the mediation in which he makes his more famous statement that
"No man is an island, entire of itself." But his expansion of the "leaf" metaphor is more intricate.
In his imagery, he turns a book into a living organism that goes through a season of rebirth -- the way a tree is reborn into a new spring of life, even though its leaves had fallen to the ground the autumn before. In Donne's intricate picture, those
"scattered leaves" are parts of our human lives, which can seem piecemeal. But God is able to give new meaning to them, even though we are all mortals. As Donne writes:
"When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book,
but translated into a better language."
One reason God is able to do that work of restoration is because "all mankind is of one author and is one volume."
Donne would doubtlessly have been aware of the long tradition in Christianity of describing the natural world as the "Book of Nature." Similar to the way that Christianity possessed a book -- the Bible -- as one source of revelation, the natural world was also viewed as being able to reveal things about God. But in his "Meditation XVII," John Donne focuses just on humans and the challenge of our mortality.
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| "not torn out" |
Death was a challenge he knew full well. His wife Anne, at the age of 33, died after giving birth to a stillborn child. Also, John Donne had to frequently deal with death as an Anglican pastor: ringing the bell to signal the loss, and then addressing the congregation through a sermon. In his "leaf" metaphor, he takes advantage of the stitched edge of a book being called its "binding" to emphasize that we are all inescapably bound together. In a more fascinating way, he describes death as not being removed from the "book" but as being
"translated" as God reveals new meaning in each person's existence. As Donne puts it:
"Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;
but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up
all our scattered leaves again for that library
where every book shall lie open to one another."
In the same way that the continuing work of the Creator recycles the minerals of a tree's fallen leaves back into the tree's new spring-life, the values of our human lives are not lost in Donne's vision. Instead, at death, they are given new, deeper meanings as part of a larger whole. Indeed, many of us have experienced how the lives of the people we have known but who have died can speak to us in a new way, even though they are physically gone from us.
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(Is there a person no longer living whose life gives you additional understanding for your own life? Who? And how?)
(All the quotations are from John Donne's "Meditation XVII" from his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.)
(The portrait of Donne is in the public domain by virtue of its age beyond the artist's life.)
