If people were taught how to read Philip Larkin,
why, or just do it,
then they wouldn't be had,
not having to believe all that people say.


Larkin's is the energy of Being, independent of ego and falseness of self.  He is part of the awakening, of stopping to think and consider everything we claim to know by the light of greater things.  He is contrary to the blindness of doing things some people think, egotistically, they need to be doing.
Larkin never, take notice, asks for anything.  He never asks to be thought of in a certain way.  He bares some things that might invite an aggressive judger of others to think worse of him, a creepy old bachelor sort of stuff.  And Larkin is quite comfortable with himself, just as he is, his energy, his being, his reflections on life and people and England.  A beautiful outsider who invites us to be insiders with our own selves.

I should like to write a book like a long poem of his, a meditation on being, persona, individuality, truth, with nothing more to say than simply telling it like it is, the way things are, just as they are, before they fall through the cracks of all the destructive constructs of ego that take simple plain old being as a sort of failure or something to be avoided.  Yes, a book, but like a poem, in need of no conclusion or resolved arch of tension and plot, just things as they are, even without need of imposed meaning.

Mr. Larkin, I am a crazy old bachelor too,
or rather, well on my way,
and even maybe crazier than you.
I wish I had the library at Hull,
there to go
and hang my hat, a place to wear
innocuously, a dark suit
so as to be inconspicuous really.
And then take my bike rides in the country,
alone to lonely churches and church yards
forgotten by the garbage pile,
to speak in my own funny tone,
with my own funny bald head and glasses,
a bachelor dressed but with no particular place to go
on a weekend.
Mr. Larkin, like a tree,
you have figured it all out,
and made no big deal out of that,
quite excellent your disguise.