Only For Now

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Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 2 in C minor “Resurrection”/II. Andante moderato

New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein

Reblogged from fuckyeahclassical: symphonyno2ineminor: accidentalcharm

I saw Granny last night. I met her in my dreams.

I knew she was dead but she was nevertheless completely solid and real.

I was worried she might vanish so I embraced her and said “I’m so glad you’ve come, please come and see me again won’t you”.

We were by a concert hall and she said “We thought you would like the music”.

I took her over to S because I wasn’t sure if S would be able to see her.

Then I woke up.

When I woke, it occurred to me that it was the sort of dream that Granny would have approved of.

For Armistice Day, 11.11.11, 11 November 2011, I am posting the closing sequence from Richard Attenborough’s film, Oh! What A Lovely War (1968).

If you make it past the first minute, you’ll start the feel its impact.

God’s greatest promise to us is not life, but death.

“

The Hindenburg disaster

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Reblogged via giantslive: emmyhearts: dreamandwake: televisedwar: lizzyfoley: mmitchelldaviss: by robert montgomery

On my way to school I saw five corpses hanging

H H Asquith recalled in his Memories and Reflections (1928) that, one morning, he was walking to school up Ludgate Hill, and got to the junction with the Old Bailey, where he saw, hanging in a row outside Newgate, with the white cap covering their heads, the hanging corpses of a gang of five murderers, exposed, according to the gruesome habit of the time, to the public gaze for an hour after their execution.

I went to the same school as him. Although he was writing as comparatively recently as 1928, he was remembering a morning in his childhood which he dated at about February 1864, when he was 11 years old.

Asquith went on to be a brilliant classical scholar at Oxford, a barrister, King’s Counsel, a Member of Parliament and, eventually, Prime Minister.

Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, by Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea, circa 1891-1894 - NPG Ax15687 - © National Portrait Gallery, London

Photograph: National Portrait Gallery

Photo by Mary Evans, from St Martin’s church, Cwmyoy, Wales.

When I was a child I was unhappy. Now I am a man, I linger in my memory of childhood and escape into a stable, self-selected past (not limited to my own recollection) which no-one can touch or share. I am surrounding myself with a shroud which separates me from the world and from other people. I am burrowing inside myself for a peaceful place which is part oblivion, part fantasy. Escape. Escape. Move away. Let it go; leave it alone. I am so eager for death. But I cannot say that death would be everything I yearn for. I have always wanted love, boundless love, and in S— I have found it. Rest and peace, too, I have always looked for; and I well remember as a teenager huddling in my bed and being grateful for sleep; thinking that sleep was the best of all my states of mind and life.

You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me. But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer of myself in marriage, you could draw me to any good—every good—with equal force.

“

—	Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (via libraryland)

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful… . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

“

—	Ann Druyan, talking about her dead husband Carl Sagan (via savagemike) (via atheistramblings) (via hardcorejudas)

The minute you have children, suicide’s a no-go isn’t it? I mean, ultimately that’s what stops Laura [a character in his screenplay The Hours] killing herself. You would really have to be in terrible distress to kill yourself with children. As a young man, of course, you think about killing yourself. Who doesn’t?

“

—	Sir David Hare interviewed in The Times 11 February 2003. Painting of him below by Paula Rego (2005)