Icarus has the answer!

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky

To the question "why do we adults never seem to vanquish our shadows," Sindre's answer is "Because the sun always shines on us!" - not such a far cry from Auden's "the sun shone / as it had to,": you sparky young skald!

After a week of restlessly pacing the Munchian cage of swimming pools where, rather dismayingly, no cameras are allowed, I'm reverting to my favourite shot of our Villa Lucia watering spot (taken by Sindre's Dad), to which I add the full text of Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts (thus escaping FB's enforced bittiness):

About suffering they were never wrong,


The old Masters: how well they understood


Its human position: how it takes place


While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;


How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting


For the miraculous birth, there always must be


Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating


On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot


That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course


Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot


Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse


Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away


Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may


Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,


But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone


As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green


Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen


Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,


Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.