When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Stone Is Not Stone
There was a time when stone was stone
And a face on the street was a finished face.
Between the Thing, myself and God alone
There was an instant symmetry.
Since you have altered all my world this trinity is twisted:

Stone is not stone
And faces like the fractioned characters in dreams are incomplete
Until in the child’s inchoate face
I recognize your exiled eyes.
The soldier climbs the glaring stair leaving your shadow.
Tonight, this torn room sleeps
Beneath the starlight bent by you.

“But even that side of Kitt obscured the Kitt who was passionately devoted to and supported peace and civil rights causes. The clash with Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson at the celebrity women’s luncheon in January 1968 gave the first public hint of that.”

*

William Calvin, author of Global Fever, attempting to answer John Brockman’s question, “What will change everything?”:

Climate will change our worldview. That each of us will die someday ranks up there with 2+2=4 as one of the great certainties of all time. But we are accustomed to think of our civilization as perpetual, despite all of the history and prehistory that tells us that societies are fragile. The junior-sized slices of society such as the church or the corporation, also assumed to outlive the participant, provide us with everyday reminders of bankruptcy. Climate change is starting to provide daily reminders, challenging us to devise ways to build in resiliency, an ability to bounce back when hit hard.

*

In That Shakespeherian Rag, Steven W Beattie posts about the results of a survey which concludes that, “Almost half of Canadians could not name a single Canadian author unprompted.”
But I seriously wonder if the results would differ significantly in any other country. What do you think? Do you live in a stimulating literary culture?

*

The top 100 books of all time, alphabetically by author, as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided.

*

The Telegraph reports on a man whose home was full of rubbish which he navigated through an intricate network of tunnels. He died after losing his way in the labyrinth. Police called in a specialist team – equipped with breathing apparatus – to search the two-storey house. They discovered a confusing system of tunnels networking around the interior of the building, with Mr Stewart lying dead inside.

*

Ash and Carry. Way to Go. Dan Neil in the LA Times Mag looks at the business of death:

There are other ways to decrease the deceased. A Tulsa, Okla., firm called Compacted Dignity offers a “tasteful and attractive alternative” to cremation. The company uses a 400-ton hydraulic press–formerly a stamping machine at a mining company–to squeeze the remains into a block small enough to put on your mantle. The company calls its process “the clear choice for body compression, reduction and liquifactious-deminution [sic].” Who am I to argue?

*

George Orwell please come home.
Caroline Gammell at Telegraph UK, reports on a mother who was prevented from taking her son to school because of criminal- record checks:

Amanda Hodgson, 36, a law-abiding mother-of-three, learned of her “criminal past” when applying for a post as a welfare assistant at her local primary school.
She was told she had a criminal record stretching back 18 years, including three convictions for assaulting police officers, and the only way to clear her name was to get her fingerprints checked against every unsolved crime in the country.

In Dublin a week later, that would be September 19th, Neary minus his whiskers was recognized by a former pupil called Wylie, in the General Post Office, contemplating from behind the statue of Cuchulain. Neary had bared his head, as though the holy ground meant something to him. Suddenly he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are. The Civic Guard on duty in the building, roused from a tender reverie by the sound of blows, took in the situation at his leisure, disentangled his baton and advanced with measured tread, thinking he had caught a vandal in the act. Happily Wylie, whose reactions as a street bookmaker’s stand were as rapid as a zebra’s, had already seized Neary round the waist, torn him back from the sacrifice and smuggled him halfway to the exit.
‘Howlt on there, youze,’ said the CG.
Wylie turned back, rapped his forehead and said, as one sane man to another:
‘John o’ God’s. Hundred per cent harmless.’
‘Come back in here, owwathat,’ said the CG.
Wylie, a tiny man, stood at a loss. Neary, almost as large as the CG, though not of course so nobly proportioned, rocked blissfully on the right arm of his rescuer. It was not in the CG’s nature to bandy words, nor had it come into any branch of his training. He resumed his steady advance.
‘Stillorgan,’ said Wylie. ‘Not Dundrum.’
The CG laid his monstrous hand on Wylie’s left arm and exerted a strong pull along the line he had mapped out in his mind. They all moved off in the desired direction, Neary shod with orange-peel.
‘John o’God’s,’ said Wylie. ‘As quiet as a child.’
They drew up behind the statue. A crowd gathered behind them. The CG leaned forward and scrutinized the pillar and draperies.
‘Not a feather out of her,’ said Wylie. ‘No blood, no brains, nothing.’
The CG straightened up and let go Wylie’s arm.
‘Move on,’ he said to the crowd, ‘before yer moved on.’
The crowd obeyed, with the single diastole-systole which is all the law requires. Feeling amply repaid by this superb symbol for the trouble and risk he had taken in issuing an order, the CG inflected his attention to Wylie and said more kindly:
‘Take my advice, mister -’ He stopped. To devise words of advice was going to tax his ability to the utmost. When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how he was to emerge? And before a hostile audience! His embarrassment was if possible increased by the expression of strained attention on Wylie’s face, clamped there by the promise of advice.
‘Yes, sergeant,’ said Wylie, and held his breath.
‘Run him back to Stillorgan,’ said the CG. Done it!
Wylie’s face came asunder in gratification.
‘Never fear, sergeant,’ he said, urging Neary towards the exit, ‘back to the cell, blood heat, next best thing to never being born, no heroes, no fisc, no-’
Neary had been steadily recovering all this time, and now gave such a jerk to Wylie’s arm that the poor little man was nearly pulled off his feet.
‘Where am I?’ said Neary. ‘If and when.’
Wylie rushed him into the street and into a Dalkey tram that had just come in. The crowd dispersed, the better to gather elsewhere. The CG dismissed the whole sordid episode from his mind, the better to brood on a theme very near to his heart.

My copy is the Picador paperback, published by Pan Books in association with Calder and Boyars in London in 1973 and its pages are yellow with age, the spine cracked and, as I read further and further, more cracked so that several of the pages came loose and tried to escape.
The book was first published in the UK in 1938 after being rejected more than forty times. As a prose satire it follows the doings of several characters with enormous vocabularies, at the centre of which waxes the consciousness of Murphy. At the bidding of his lover, Celia Kelly, Murphy finds employment in a mental hospital in London and discovers his own desired reflection in the catatonia of the patients. This allows him to pass over from a consciousness in crisis to a state of total oblivion when he mistakes a gas tap for a lavatory chain.
Pointlessness seems to be the point of the narrative. Pointlessness and entrapment. London is a trap. The entire solar system is a trap, and there is no way out apart from death, the release into silence and the absence of being. None of the Dickensian characters pursuing Murphy around London achieve anything at all. Their dreams are transparent and unattainable. It seemed apt that the book was disintegrating in my hands as I read it, and when I came to the last chapter pages were falling out all over the place and I was waked by random leaves spreading out behind me like the tail of Mr Kelly’s disappearing kite.
Nevertheless, the unsympathetic Murphy and his followers do provide Beckett with a vehicle for innovation and linguistic invention, always ironic, often blackly so, which would be refined and enhanced in later works. In Murphy, the two tramps of Godot are already becoming apparent.

Richard Ellman believes that:

Samuel Beckett is sui generis…He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached… Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void… Like salamanders we survive in his fire.