death is stronger than all proud men, throws pair of dice says: read ’em and weep
Death is stronger than all the governments because the governments are men and men die and then death laughs: Now you see ’em, now you don’t.
Death is stronger than all proud men and so death snips proud men on the nose, throws a pair of dice and says: Read ’em and weep.
Death sends a radiogram every day: When I want you I’ll drop in — and then one day he comes with a master-key and lets himself in and says: We’ll go now.
Death is a nurse mother with big arms: ‘Twont hurt you at all; it’s your time now; you just need a long sleep, child; what have you had anyhow better than sleep?
Death Snips Proud Men by Carl Sandberg as published in Smoke and Steel in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1970).
Worth repeating.
Death is stronger than all the governments because the governments are men and men die and then death laughs: Now you see ’em, now you don’t.
Death is stronger than all proud men and so death snips proud men on the nose, throws a pair of dice and says: Read ’em and weep.
Worth repeating, but who will listen?
Death sends a radiogram every day: When I want you I’ll drop in — and then one day he comes with a master-key and lets himself in and says: We’ll go now.
the squall sweeps gray-winged sense summer anger passing summer gentleness
Squall line coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, looking towards Tybee from Hilton Head Island
The squall sweeps gray-winged across the obliterated hills, And the startled lake seems to run before it; From the wood comes a clamor of leaves, Tugging at the twigs, Pouring from the branches, And suddenly the birds are still.
Thunder crumples the sky, Lightning tears at it.
And now the rain! The rain — thudding — implacable — The wind, reveling in the confusion of great pines!
And a silver sifting of light, A coolness; A sense of summer anger passing, Of summer gentleness creeping nearer — Penitent, tearful, Forgiven!
Squall as published in A Canopic Jar by Leonora Speyer von Stosch (E.P. Dutton & company: New York, 1921).
According to Wikipedia, Leonora Speyer or Lady Speyer was an American poet and violinist. She was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Count Ferdinand von Stosch of Manze in Silesia, who fought for the Union in the American Civil War, and Julia Schayer, who was a writer.
However much money she had or the Speyer’s had or the von Stosch’s had, they had enough so that she had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent.
Mr. Sargent made a lot of money painting portraits of people who had a lot of money.
It was Mr. Sargent who said that they hardest part of painting portraits of people who had a lot money was that he had to listen to those people talk while he painted.
As he put it, “Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working…. What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched.”
every day hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture
He was wont to say, “Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, — that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things.
For no man can bear to be entirely deprived of such enjoyments: it is only because they are not used to taste of what is excellent that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they be new.
For this reason,” he would add, ” one ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
With such a turn of thought in Serlo, which in some degree was natural to him, the persons who frequented his society could scarcely be in want of pleasant conversation.
From Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Thomas Carlyle (Robertson, Ashford and Bentley: London, 1901).
It is only because they are not used to taste of what is excellent that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they be new.
Maybe there is the nub of the problem.
We have moved to far away from what it was like to live in America that folks today are not used to taste of what is excellent that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they be new.
That man currently if office has an endless supply of shiny new things to pull out of his hat that some folks take delight in.
Silly and insepid things.
And here is the real trick,
All he has to do is SAY they are new.
For this reason, one ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
For today, I will let you choose the little song.
I hesitate to suggest one as it will get stuck in your mind and loop and loop and loop until you cannot stand it.
But I did recently come across this version, Just A Closer Walk With Thee by Sammy Miller and The Congregation Big Band that I enjoyed:
For the good poem, may I suggest Motto by Langston Hughes?
I play it cool I dig all jive. That's the reason I stay alive.
My motto As I live and learn, is: Dig And Be Dug
In Return.
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York : A. A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1994)
For a good picture here is a recent photo of the Maye River from the Calhoun Street Dock that I took on a foggy Sunday Morning in Bluffton, SC.
And for a few reasonable words may I suggest this passage by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn:
We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness.
It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed — only a little kind of a low chuckle.
We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all — that night, nor the next, nor the next.
Try these out today and I bet you will scarcely be in want of pleasant conversation.
permitting over accumulation of books in the premises
Adapted from the article, Too Many Books? and sub headed, Mendel Uminer faced a crisis when his landlord objected to the 10,000 volumes in his New York studio apartment by Alex Vadukul, a features writer for the Styles section of The New York Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
Mr. Vadukul quotes Mr. Uminer as saying, ““I’m always reading,” Uminer, 31, said. “I’m reading to extract knowledge. Every book I own, I need. My library is my manual for life.”
Mr. Vadukul writes about Mr. Uminer, “that He worked as a freelance Hebrew translator and used the apartment as the headquarters for his fledgling literary journal, Notarikon Review, hosting parties that gained a reputation among quarters of New York’s literary underclass. Striving writers drank beer among the teetering stacks while arguing over foreign affairs and Greek poetry.
The stacks kept rising as Uminer added his hauls from thrift shops, book dealers and eBay deliveries. “I don’t think of myself as a hoarder,” he said, “but I guess my building did.”
This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are violating a substantial obligation of your tenancy,” it began. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books in the Premises.”
Mr. Vadukul quotes a friend of Mr. Uminer, “I think it’s possible his landlord might have their priorities misplaced, or might not understand him. If you’re not steeped in his culture, maybe his library does look chaotic. But I’d argue it only looks like a mess. I’ll bet he can tell you where every single book is in his apartment.”
I did not know that maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition by permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books in the Premises, was a crime.
I sure knew books burned.
Think of the stories of the burning of the Library of Alexandria by Julius Caesar and the stories of the great Los Angeles Public Library Fire of 1986.
But that you could be cited for the over-accumulation of books in the premises?
Just something wrong there.
I think of the self graded quiz prepared by writer Paul Fussell so that readers could look over their homes and come up a rating for the ‘class’ radiated by said home.
The higher the score, the more ‘class’ inherent in the home.
These questions were part of the quiz.
Bookcase(s) partially filled with books – add 5 Any old leather bindings more than 75 years old – add 6 Bookcase(s) filled with books – add 7 Overflow books stacked on floor, chairs, ETC – add 6
Today, maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition by permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books in the Premises, is a violation.
count your own blessings and let your neighbor count theirs – secure as a vault …
Based on the James Thurber Further Fable for Our Time, The Philosopher and the Oyster.
By the sea on a lovely morning strolled a philosopher — one who seeks a magnificent explanation for his insignificance — and there he came upon an oyster lying in its shell upon the sand.
“It has no mind to be burdened by doubt,” mused the philosopher, “no fingers to work to the bone.
It can never say, ‘My feet are killing me.’
It hears no evil, sees no television, speaks no folly. It has no buttons to come off, no zipper to get caught, no hair or teeth to fall out.”
The philosopher sighed a deep sigh of envy.
“It produces a highly lustrous concretion, of great price or priceless,” he said, “when a morbid condition obtains in its anatomy, if you could call such an antic, anomalous amorphousness anatomy.”
The philosopher sighed again and said, “Would that I could wake from delirium with a circlet of diamonds upon my fevered brow.
Would, moreover, that my house were my sanctuary, as sound and secure as a safe-deposit vault.”
Just then a screaming sea gull swooped out of the sky, picked up the oyster in its claws, carried it high in the air, and let it drop upon a great wet rock, shattering the shell and splattering its occupant.
There was no lustrous concretion, of any price whatever, among the debris, for the late oyster had been a very healthy oyster, and, anyway, no oyster ever profited from its pearl.
MORALS: Count your own blessings, and let your neighbor count his.
Where there is no television, the people also perish.
I quote from Mr. Thurber today because, if you subscribed to the New Yorker Magazine in the year 1956, and on this day in 1956, you got your copy of the New Yorker from your mailbox and read later that night after dinner, on page 19, you would have read The Philosopher and the Oyster as that was when the story was first published.
Seventy years ago today or as Mr. Lincoln might say, Three Score and Ten.
The Further Fables, according to one biography were all written in a Columbus, Ohio hotel where Thurber was staying as he visited with his family for a month in 1955.
According the biography, James Thurber : his life and times by Harrison Kinney (Holt: New York, 1995), Thurber began a new series of fables. Thirty-seven of them ran in the New Yorker from May 12 to October 13, 1956. Katharine White had obtained permission from Harper & Bros, to run certain illustrations from the 1940 Fables for Our Time with the new fables, and, beyond her official call of duty, obtained additional permission for their use in both the American and British editions of Further Fables for Our Time. Most of the other illustrations in the books are composites of Thurber’s cartoons and spots over the years.
Mr. Kinney continues: Further Fables for Our Time, complete with the New Yorker rejects, was published October 31, 1956, with a first printing of thirty thousand copies. The Book Find Club accounted for another fifteen thousand, and the New Yorker s business department had five thousand complimentary copies bound to send to advertising space buyers. S. J. Perelman let it be known that the fables contained “the finest writing of our time,” but Thurber was upset to be told that one reviewer had called them “the tired writing of a tired man.” That another critic had said, “He writes with the verve of a young man” didn’t compensate him for the put-down.
In a letter to a Miss Carolyn Wilson, dated West Cornwall, Connecticut, May 2, 1960, Mr. Thurber writes:
Our mutual friend Libba Thayer has given me your address and reminded me that you and I were great friends of Elmer Davis,’ so I felt like writing to you.
Elmer Davis was my favorite American of this century, as I have said in private and in print, and I was happy that he lived to read my dedication to him of Further Fables for Our Time. He wrote me a brief, painful, but bright note about it, saying that it made him feel like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Schweitzer. I know a great many other admirers of Elmer, including Edward P. Morgan, who broadcasts for WABC, and many newspapermen. (Selected letters of James Thurber by James Thurber (London : Hamish Hamilton, 1982)).
Mr. Kinney commented: The dedication page of Further Fables for Our Time reads: “To Elmer Davis, whose comprehension of people and persons has lighted our time, so that we can see where we are going, these fables are dedicated with admiration, affection and thankfulness.” Thurber had been a faithful listener to Davis, whose defiant radio broadcasts against McCarthyism had somehow stayed on the air despite warnings to the ABC network from Vincent Hartnett, editor of Red Channels. Davis was in the hospital with an illness that would prove fatal. He was moved by Thurber’s compassionate efforts to cheer him, and wrote Thurber that given his years of blindness, Thurber surely had too many He was moved by Thurber’s compassionate efforts to cheer him, and wrote Thurber that given his years of blindness, Thurber surely had too many of his own travails to worry about Davis’s.
According to Wikipedia, Elmer Holmes Davis (January 13, 1890 – May 18, 1958) was an American news reporter, author, the Director of the United States Office of War Information during World War II and a Peabody Award recipient. Beginning on January 3, 1954, he had a program on ABC Radio on Sundays from 10:15 to 10:30 Eastern Time. Davis used the platform to criticize Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-communist investigations.
To repeat, Thurber had been a faithful listener to Davis, whose defiant radio broadcasts against McCarthyism had somehow stayed on the air despite warnings to the ABC network from Vincent Hartnett, editor of Red Channels.
And again, His defiant radio broadcasts against McCarthyism had somehow stayed on the air despite warnings to the ABC network.
Ripples from little stones dropped in the pool.
You can see all of the Thurber images online that I have collected at For Muggs and Rex.
