



Stanley Kunitz published this poem when he was 73 years old:
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. Stanley Kunitz, 1905 - 2006
When pre-pubescent I felt that moorlands and woodlands were sacred: people seemed rather profane.
Thus, when I started to verse, I presently sat at the feet of Hardy and Thomas and Frost.
Falling in love altered that, now Someone, at least, was important: Yeats was a help, so was Graves.
Then, without warning, the whole Economy suddenly crumbled: there, to instruct me, was Brecht.
Finally, hair-raising things that Hitler and Stalin were doing forced me to think about God.
Why was I sure they were wrong? Wild Kierkegaard, Williams and Lewis guided me back to belief.
Now, as I mellow in years and home in a bountiful landscape, Nature allures me again.
Who are the tutors I need? Well, Horace, adroitest of makers, beeking in Tivoli, and
Goethe, devoted to stones, who guessed that — he never could prove Newton led science astray.
Fondly I ponder You all: without You I couldn’t have managed even my weakest of lines.
- W.H. Auden, 1973I'm betting most of us, even the children of economists, weren't raised to ponder life insurance as an instrument of business entrepreneurship. And yet, when you think about it more broadly, is there a more compelling bet both for and against oneself, than life insurance?
Surely the idea of buying life insurance now to one day leverage in one's business to cover payroll or finance debt is odd. But in some ways, "Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another....," as the most famous life insurance salesman of all time, and the only one to win a Pulitzer Prize, Wallace Stevens, once wrote. I'd imagine Kroc, Stanford, Penney and many 21st century entrepreneurs might recognize themselves in these lines from Stevens' Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction:We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.