The title of this novel, Everything Turns Away, comes from the poem “Musée des Beaux Art” by W. H. Auden, written in 1938 while Auden was staying in Brussels. In the poem Auden discusses the impact suffering has on humans. In the musée he contemplates the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus – a painting he thought was by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. (It is now believed to be an early copy of Brueghel’s lost original, painted by an unknown artist.) The painting depicts the goings-on of ordinary life, but in the lower right-hand corner the artist has depicted Icarus’s legs sticking out of the ocean, the aftermath of his wings melting from flying too close to the sun. Auden notes, “How everything turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster.”
This poem feels personal. You can imagine
