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John Donne has long been one of my favourite poets, but I haven't previously read a great deal of his prose works. Therefore I was surprised this morning to discover that two well-known phrases come directly out of Donne's Meditation XVII.
The one that brought my attention to the passage is the line often misquoted as "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee". It was borrowed by Ernest Hemmingway for the title of his 1940 novel For whom the bell tolls (which, I must confess, I haven't read) and I believe that there's also a Metallica song by the same name. A few months back I discovered a cartoon based on the same phrase, proclaiming "Ask not for whom the photocopier jams; it jams for thee", which I liked so much I stuck a copy of it above my office photocopier (mainly for the benefit of my boss, who doesn't get on very well with our photocopier).
Having discovered the source of this quotation, I was surprised to find that the paragraph containing it begins with another famous phrase: "No man is an island" (Paul Simon notwithstanding). I recall an expansion of it that I used to occasionally come across on the Unix "fortune" program (or possibly the Amiga derivative thereof) - "No man is an island, but then again no man is a potato salad either".
Flippancy aside, the point of both phrases, and the text containing them, is essentially that we are all connected to one another in some way and that our actions inevitably, if often invisibly, have an effect on those around us. Here is the whole passage bordered by the two phrases (note the actual wording of the bell one):
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne - Meditation XVII.
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