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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “At the Zoo” Down in the Dirt v210 (8/23)  Order the paperback book: 
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The Flowering ‘thorn
John Farquhar Young
“A duty, a duty, a duty, a duty,” Anne sighs under her breath, as she glances at the cloudless May sky, firmly shuts the ill-fitting garden gate of her cottage that her husband always intended to fix but never did, and walks up the narrow lane as briskly as her arthritis will allow. The clear, crisp morning would, in earlier years, have encouraged her to don her walking shoes and, with her husband, step out along one of the many country paths leading inland from the village.
Now she dislikes walking, dislikes the throbbing pain in her hip - the unavoidable reminder of her physical decline.
Walking is a duty, part of a more general duty: keeping fit. The duty to try to remain mobile satisfies what she recalls is an eighteenth-century philosopher’s test of the adequacy of a moral rule: “Can the rule without contradiction be generalized into something like a universal law - a law applicable to everyone?” Well roughly speaking, she always thinks with an inner shrug at the same time acknowledging that her fifty odd years’ old recollection of her university exposure to Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is likely to be a lot less than perfect. But she doesn’t care about that. Some small, perhaps recontoured fragments of Kant’s work have, since the death of her husband, gained therapeutic significance.
“Do the right thing ... as reason dictates!”
This injunction, she finds, strengthens her resolve to struggle against unwholesome doubts about the purpose of her existence which all too often slither out of the dark recesses of her mind.
Kant, the eighteenth-century Prussian, is a stern and steely supervisor of her thoughts and indeed the pattern of her day. She is grateful that she has rediscovered Kant.
Maintaining the appearance of being happy - that’s another ‘ought’, another duty, another rule to be observed. “Do not depress people with your long, sad face!”
“Anne is always cheerful,” she often imagines people saying to each other. “She went through a very bad spell. Her husband’s final illness was long and very testing.” The idea that other people think that she’s a well-adjusted, resilient, old lady gives her a fleeting burst of pleasure. But pleasant feelings she regards as an emotional type of Trojan horse. If savored too fully, if admitted into the inner parts of her mind, such indulgences would, she believes, corrode her will and eventually leave her unable to face the challenges of life.
This morning, as always, she starts her walk briskly, but - as often happens - the pain in her hip soon intrudes fiercely into her awareness and forces her to slow her pace.
“I’m going to get this hip fixed sometime soon,” she tells herself, but, in the next instant, her intention is firmly nudged aside by a continued aversion to the involvement of medical professions in her life. Medical intervention did little to alleviate the torture of her husband’s closing months.
Another duty: “Seeing things as they are.”
She has what she thinks is a clear-eyed view of the limitations of medical science. After her husband mercifully passed away her doctor wanted to give her antidepressants. “Mind-pills,” she disdainfully labelled them. “Crutches that once relied on made you lame. Taking them: A sign of weakness!”
The route of her intended walk will take her to the nearby beach and then inland along a gently ascending path leading to the summit of a moderately sized hill. There, before retracing her steps, she intends to stand for a few minutes doing her breathing exercises.
Today the hill seems a bit steeper than usual. She chides herself. “My leg muscles are getting flabby. More hill climbing required!”
At a bend in the path, she pauses in front of a massive hawthorn bush now in full bloom, an explosion of white in the morning sun. Before being overtaken by the creeping infirmity that destroyed their life together her husband would stand admiring the blossom. “Life is good!” he would sometimes exclaim. “Life is good!”
But life for him was not good - not latterly. As his brain deteriorated and as he lapsed into a world of inner torment, anger and confusion, his existence and her own life turned into a living nightmare.
“Joys pass so quickly!” she reminds herself.
Lines penned by the Scottish poet Rabbie Burns, learnt at school, often come back to her.
“But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white—then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.”
As she looks at the hawthorn bush, thoughts, and questions meander in slow procession through her mind. “How long will the blossom last? Days - perhaps a week or so - and then the blossom will be swept away, scattered before the gentlest breeze. And afterwards what will remain? The thorns will continue, sometimes exposed and at other times hidden beneath the leaves.”
The image blends with her convictions. “In life so many thorns have to be grasped, the pain endured. But to some extent, duty sheaths the pain, separates it, compartmentalizes it, makes it bearable.”
“A life regulated by rules: There is some perhaps grim satisfaction to be had from that!”
“Not pleasure,” she sternly reminds herself. “Satisfaction is not the same as pleasure, not the same at all!”
Suddenly she becomes acutely conscious of the weakness in her legs. She settles herself on a large boulder.
“Just a few moments to recover,” she tells herself, uncomfortable with the thought that she is conceding anything to physical frailty. She allows her thoughts to drift ungoverned down the corridors of her memories, back to childhood years and to her exposure to elementary mathematics surfaces. Drawing lines on graph paper, plotting the slope of lines and curves against the values on the vertical X axis and the vertical Y axis - she loved that - the reconciliation of two measurements in the form of a line.
A further question occurs to her: “How many dimensions do I have in my life?” The answer erupts from a subterranean place in her mind. “Only one! You measure your life - your worth - along one, and only one, axis: the dimension of the will guided by reason.”
“Have I become a machine?” she murmurs grimly, vaguely directing her question towards the hawthorn bush.
She rewalks a well-trodden path in her reasoning. “Machine or not I need to have steel in my soul. Steel yes, weapons yes, life is a battle, weapons are necessary, yes steel.”
She returns her attention to the hawthorn bush. “All things pass, all beauty fades.” A line from Burns’ poem surfaces again. “You SEIZE the flower, the bloom is shed.”
She fixes on a word: SEIZE! “Seize what? Memories?”
Seizing! Security, safety, certainty? “Fear. Fear of loss. I am afraid!” The conclusion does not please her. Rules are an antidote for fear.
“I feel so tired!” she murmurs. Tiredness is a challenge. “I feel like a quick nap. But I can’t sleep here.”
To rouse herself she tries to concentrate on the scene beneath her - the houses and cottages clustered around the bay, the fields, a small patch of woodland and the sea gently massaging the small, neatly contoured beach.
“I feel so tired.”
A peace settles over her. As she slips to the grass she glimpses the hawthorn blossom, so bright, so white, expanding, strangely encompassing and ... comforting.
“Life is so good, so good,” she murmurs as her life drifts softly to a close.
