In Chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel—so the story goes—Belshazzar, last ruler of the Babylonian Empire, throws a great feast to celebrate his victory over the Israelites and his army’s destruction of the First Temple. During the feast, he drinks from vessels looted from that temple and as he sips, a mysterious hand appears, writing these words on a wall of Belshazzar’s palace: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” For those of you who don’t happen to speak Aramaic, that translates to “Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided,” a phrase interpreted by the prophet Daniel to mean that God has judged Belshazzar and doomed his empire. As a result, ever since that ghostly hand appeared, the phrase “the writing on the wall” has always prophesied failure, doom, and destruction.
Fast forward to our time and another wall—one immortalized by the poet Robert Frost. One of his most beloved poems, “Mending Wall,” begins with these words: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” In simple blank verse, Frost recounts the annual task of two neighbors rebuilding an old stone wall that has always separated their property. At one time, the wall may have served a useful purpose by keeping the neighbor’s cows out of Frost’s orchard. Those cows are long gone (“He is all pine and I am apple orchard”) so to Frost, the old divide is no longer necessary. But his neighbor believes differently; to him, it’s a simple equation, an adage inherited from his father: “Good fences make good neighbors.” As a result, on a chilly morning every spring, on they go: two aging neighbors, limping along, stacking stones to repair an old wall that no longer serves any real purpose. To Frost, the old wall is nothing more than a neighborly habitual task—a crumbling remnant of a bygone era, a waste of time, an old-fashioned folly. But to the man across the wall, it still serves a useful purpose if only because “good fences make good neighbors.”
Frost knew that any wall is an imperfect barrier. Every spring, he and his neighbor would meet on the appointed day to repair what winter and hunters had undone. Nature conspired against the wall by causing frozen ground-swells to topple boulders, making gaps “where even two can pass abreast;” as for those pesky hunters, they did even more of the dirty work, rooting out rabbits and removing stones “to please the yelping dogs.” Frost knew in his bones that this annual chore—lifting and restacking stones to rebuild an old and useless wall—was a Sisyphean task, but every year, he did it anyway. Why? I guess only to please a neighbor who remained stuck in that deep old rut that stubbornly clung to the tired hand-me-down that “good fences make good neighbors.”
So what should we make of the wall that everyone is currently talking about; the one that shut down our government for more than a month; the one that is needed to resolve a supposed “national emergency” that apparently never needed to happen in the first place? I wonder if there will there be any prophetic writing on that wall. I wonder if perhaps we shouldn’t be asking ourselves the same question that Frost poetically pondered to himself: “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out.”
“Mending Wall” concludes with two clean lines: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That wants it down.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
I’ll be right back.
Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with homes in Chestertown and Bethesda. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy magazine. “A Place to Stand,” a book of photographs and essays about Landon School, was published by the Chester River Press in 2015. A collection of his essays titled “Musing Right Along” was published in May 2017; a second volume of Musings entitled “I’ll Be Right Back” was released in June 2018. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com
[…] The Writing on the Wall by Jamie Kirkpatrick Author jamiewkPosted on February 19, 2019Categories Musings […]