Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.

“Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug,--push it a little-- crowd it a little--weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand." (excerpt "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts).


 ... Samuel Clemens  (1835-1910) [aka Mark Twain], American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer.

Spatial relationship

"Eight Bells"

“Eight Bells” features two mariners, nearly identical in appearance and outfit.    The pair depict two types of looking, one peering out in the distance, the other focused on something close at hand. In their spatial relationship, the two individuals can be construed as a striking metaphor of the scientific counterpoint duality of exploring on one hand the immense vastness of the cosmos and on the other the deep intrinsic probing of microscopic nature. Painted in 1886 this is one of Homer’s most celebrated paintings.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker

Pictured at 44 a quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature; and dry sense of humor. Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War (1861–1865), where he sketched battle scenes and camp life, the quiet moments as well as the chaotic ones. He was very private about his personal life and his methods. Perhaps Homer's austere individualism is aptly captured in this curious admonition to artists and painters.

"Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems. Leave rocks for your old age—they're easy"

Funerailles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=lRNy4pUTgWQ

The "Original Seven"

The "Original Seven"

NASA's first group of Mercury astronauts (the "Original Seven") pictured here at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), now Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas (June 1963) included Naval aviators, Air Force pilots and a Marine Corps aviator.
Conceivably any one of them could have been first man on the moon some five years later, but each were integral parts of the team that spectacularly achieved that effort. They’re all gone now* but what a fantastic legacy they left in their wake.


* (left to right):

Cooper 2004 (77) [heart failure]
Schirra 2007 (84) [heart attack]
Shepard 1998 (75) [leukemia]
Grissom 1967 (41) [testing accident]
Glenn 2016 (95)
Slayton 1993 (69) [malignant brain tumor]
Carpenter 2013 (88) [stroke]

The man who filled his own life and all our existence with bright light.

‭“‬If there is life hereafter,‭ ‬or if there is none,‭ ‬it does not matter.‭”

“Everything on earth depends on will. I never had an idea in my life. I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment; the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game. The ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens he’s there to catch it; if he wasn’t, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his.”

… Thomas Edison (1847-1931),  American inventor and businessman

Obsequy

… the unavailing gestures of impotent hopes are sealed in earth overset with rock

There is inestimable companionship in graveyards
Where the unavailing gestures of impotent hopes
Are sealed in earth overset with rock, and many dead
No longer fret and fume, but rest ; while the knowledge
Of the life their corpses once have housed
Is breathing on the granite and the marble slabs
When the atmosphere about is conscious, if with vainest grief.

… Robert McAlmon (1895-1956), American author, poet and publisher.