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.

Interpretive renderings of a realist artist

His favorite thing was painting sunlight on the side of a house

"At fifty you don't think of the end much. But at eighty you think of it a lot.
Find me a philosopher to comfort me in my old age".

             ... Edward Hopper (1882-1967), american realist painter.

Hotel by a Railroad (1952)

Cry "Havoc!", and let slip the dogs of war

Opium and aspiration led him on

  "The Home-coming"

      ... Ralph Cheever Dunning (1878-1930), poet.

SCENE: A room in a house half demolished by shell-fire on a deserted battlefield. Indistinct figure of an old woman. Enter another figure, like a young soldier, through a half-open door.

Old Woman. Is that you, Charles?

Young Soldier. Yes, Granny—where are you?

Old Woman. I am here in the corner, Charles. How did you escape from the battle?

Young Soldier. I do not know; but here I am, as you can see.

Old Woman. I do not see you very plainly, Charles.

Young Soldier. I cannot see you at all, Granny.
Old Woman. I tell you I am here in the corner.
Young Soldier. Very well, Granny; I begin to see you now.
Old Woman. Please close the door behind you. I would not
have it open for a minute with all those strange noises about.
Young Soldier. I cannot close the door, Granny. It must have
 been jammed by the explosion.
Old Woman. But it has been swinging in the wind.
Young Soldier. Yes, but I cannot close it. Where are all the others?
Old Woman. They went away in a big cart.
Young Soldier. Is Margaret safe?
Old Woman. She went away in the cart.         
Young Soldier. Why did not you go?
Old Woman. I am too old to leave the house where I was born.
I hid myself, and your father said they could not waste time looking for me.
Young Soldier. How long before the firing began did they leave?
Old Woman. About an hour, I think.
Young Soldier. Then they must all be killed.  
Old Woman. Yes, perhaps.
Young Soldier. They might have hidden in the hills.
Old Woman. They did not have time. War is terrible for poor people, Charles.
Young Soldier. It is, indeed. If you could see the things I have seen!
Our field and the old barn are all torn, and the bridge over the brook is blown up.
Old Woman. It is very terrible to think of.        
Young Soldier. Granny!
Old Woman. Yes, Charles.
Young Soldier. If I tell you something you must not be frightened.
Old Woman. I will try not to be.
Young Soldier. I am only a ghost, Granny. I am lying dead out there
with my eyes open. I could not close them any more than I could close the door.         
Old Woman. Now I can tell you, Charles: I am only a ghost, too; my body
is lying in the cellar.
Young Soldier. You were killed when the shell blew the house to pieces?
Old Woman. Yes, Charles.
Young Soldier. What shall we do now, Granny?
Old Woman. We can do nothing but linger now. Perhaps when the war
is over we shall die completely.

This be the verse you grave for me

"sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little"^[

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

 ... Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.

Stevenson's tomb on Upolu island in Samoa

 

... for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls



"a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn"

"I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls". 

    ... Albert Einstein (1879-1955), theoretical physicist

Time-warp

Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me

"Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you...I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a relief to so endless a state of existense."

... Emily Dickinson (1830-86), American poet

Motherly intuition

My mother never wrote me a letter, ever. Father had on occasion. Both were not much into letter writing. When I did receive a letter from her, it was a complete surprise. It simply stated my father had some minor physical ailment, the nature of which she was not precise nor did she, so I thought, understand. But she sensed it was a death knell without really saying so. It was a quality which she had that hinted at folksy wisdom which I respected, one of the few qualities she had I did respect. It was a “heads up” letter that proved out.

Suicide, Gonzo style

'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

... Hunter S Thompson (1937-2005), American journalist and author, in a note left for his wife four days before he shot himself in the head.

... on the face of it

"Look at these eyes. I'm dead - behind these eyes. I'm dead."

           
                ... Laurence Olivier (1907-89) from the the John Osbourne (1924-94) play "The Entertainer"

God is not great ...

"Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me"

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist…. I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

... Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), author, journalist, and celebrated atheist who wrote the best seller "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (2007)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4s1nVm3mO8&feature=related

A genius ... after and before

Beethoven (1770-1827) Death Mask, Kunsthistoriches museum, Vienna.

... at 13 by an unknown Bonn master

There is controversy as to whether this was done before the autopsy or after ... at any rate it was apparently carried out two days after Beethoven's death. The resemblance to his depiction as a child in a contemporary portrait is remarkable. Life’s toll registered in the death mask itself is intensely profound.

 

Taking in a movie ...

“A lot of people [are] in the dark sharing something that can’t be put into words. And since all of life is basically not mentioning the main thing - that we’re going to die – we’re used to the idea of something bigger than anything going on, but unspoken.” … observed by film director Mike Nichols (b.1931) about movies.

Bergman confesses ...

Confessor: My heart is void … the void is a mirror. I see my face … feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.

Death: Yet you do not want to die.

Confessor: Yes I do.

Death: What are you waiting for?

Confessor: Knowledge.

Death: A guarantee?

Confessor: Call it what you will.Is it so hard to conceive god with one’s senses?
Why must he hide in the midst of vague promises and invisible miracles?
How are we to believe the believers when we don’t believe ourselves?
What will become of us who want to believe, but cannot?
And what of those who neither will nor can believe?
Why can’t I kill god within me?
Why does he go on living in a painful and humiliating way … a mocking reality which I cannot get rid of?

... excerpt from the movie "The Seventh Seal", Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), director & writer. When asked about this scene in an interview late in life, Bergman commented:

"I was afraid of this enormous emptiness. But my personal view now is that when we die, we die and we go from a state of something to a state of absolute nothingness ... and I don't believe for a second that there is anything above or beyond, or anything like that ... and this makes me enormously secure."