...to know the future is curse. (the trilogy Dune recognizes the same truth)


And many others before and since.

When my mother was 85 and dying from lung cancer, she scared the daylights out of one of the aides in her Assisted Living facility by struggling out of bed, staring out the window, and reciting with perfect lucidity a verse she had committed to memory sixty-five or so years earlier, in her more-flagrantly-Emily-Dickinson phase:

SONNET

Oh, bless the law that veils the future's face;
For who could smile into a baby's eyes,
Or bear the beauty of the evening skies,
If he could see what cometh on apace?

The ticking of the death watch would replace
The baby's prattle for the overwise;
The breeze's murmur would become the cries
Of stormy petrels where the breakers race.

We live and move the walker in his sleep,
Who moves because he sees not the abyss
His feet are skirting as he goes his way:

If we could see the morrow from the steep
Of our security, the soul would miss
Its footing and fall headlong from today.

-- Eugene Lee-Hamilton


And she had copied it out, too; I was surprised to find it afterwards in a hand-written book of transcriptions of poems that had caught her eye. I have no idea how many times in the interval she might have thought of it; I know it was the first time my sister or I had ever heard it.