Remembering D Day

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we live
in Flanders fields.

Take up our quarel with the foes
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders field.

- Lt. Col. John McCrae (1872 - 1918) [lies buried in Flanders field]

"To be heading into the inexerable...where no mother will care for us...no woman crosses our path...where only reality reigns...with cruelty and grandeur."

The Maiden:
"It's all over! alas, it's all over now!
Go, savage man of bone!
I am still young - go, devoted one!
and do not molest me."

Death:
"Give me your hand, you fair and tender form!
I am a friend; I do not come to punish.
Be of good cheer! I am not savage.
You shall sleep gently in my arms."

This poem is the inspiration for Schubert's melancholic and sublime "Death and the Maiden" string quartet.

Gensis of existentialism

One of my favorite excerpts from what I consider to be the primer and template of modern day existentialism.

"Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.

And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

- The unnamed narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.

One of my favorite English actors also left one of the best suicide notes . . . as far as suicide notes go. Brief, apropos and to the point.

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

- George Sanders

In Memoriam A.H.H.

If Sleep and Death by truly one,
And every spirit's folded bloom
Thro' all its intervital gloom
In some long trance should slumber on;

Unconscious of the sliding hour,
Bare of the body, might it last,
And silent traces of the past
Be all the color of the flower:

So then were nothing lost to man;
So that still garden of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began;

And love will last as pure and whole
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Reawaken with the dawing soul.

A Devil's Tale

"As I was walking among the fires of hell, delight with the
enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and
insanity, I collected some of thier Proverbs: thinking that as
the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs
of Hell shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any
description of buildings of garments."

- From William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell