Famous literary last words

It is interesting that relatively few dying statements show the presence of horror, or even great sorrow.  One writer said, “After reading thousands of death-bed utterances, one is struck and comforted by how comparatively pleasant dying is reported to be.  Especially when compared with other ordeals.  Such as living, for example.”

Charles Darwin:  “I am not the least afraid to die.”

Thomas Carlyle:  “So this is death  –  well  –  ”

Socrates:  “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius;  will you remember to pay the debt?”

Jean Jacques Rousseau:  “I go to see the sun for the last time.”

George Wilhelm Hegel:  “Only one man ever understood me … and he didn’t understand me.”

Voltaire:  “Let me die in peace.”  There is also the story which might be apocryphal:  when the priest begged Voltaire to renounce the devil, Voltaire said: “This is not the time to be making enemies.”

William Saroyan:  “Everybody has to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.  Now what?”

Nero:  “What an artist dies in me!”

Henry James:  “So this is at last, the distinguished thing.”

Heinrich Heine:  His will read:  “I leave my entire estate to my wife on condition that she remarry;  then there will be at least one man to regret my death.”

Sir Walter Scott:  “God bless you all, I feel myself again.”

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

September, 2022  (25.9)

Source

Robert Hendrickson:  The Literary Life & other curiosities (Penguin Books, London. 1981.)

Toon Tellegen – a poem about poems

Toon Tellegen was born in Brielle, southern Holland, in 1941.  While he studied medicine and practised as a doctor, he wrote extensively, specializing in later life in children’s stories.  His poetry is known for exploring feelings in unsual ways.  The poem included here is called Conditions which a poem must fulfil.

It must be painful –

always, come what may

I must never agree with

it.

With a lantern and a magnifying glass I muston my knees and then flat on my belly  –

hunt for the logic

that it keeps letting drop.

It must lift itself  –  let there be no doubt about that  –

It must always lift itself out of its humble chair

and open the windows

and sing  –  loudly, hoarsely, absurdly  –

of love and of me,

the scent of roses and immortality, almost convincing about it,

and more painful still it must be, far more painful still

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

September, 2022  (18.9)

Source of poem lost

Image of Tellegen Wikipedia

Greek beliefs

It is bracing to see ourselves as others see us, bracing to see ourselves as we ourselves see us.  Even more so to attempt to understand people and cultures from the ancient world.  We stand before a Greek statue in wonder and expand that wonder to thinking Who were these people?  And we may even ask What did they believe?  These are not superficial questions.  The culture in question is the foundation of Western culture.

Zeus

They were polytheists, much like the many nations surrounding the Hebrews.  The gods that populated their pantheon ranged from Zeus, the supreme god, to the gods of home and hearth.  I have seen shrines in the homes of some Catholics to angels who might be seen to have the same role as the gods of hearth and home in ancient Greece.  St Anthony of Padua, for example, is angel you appeal to if you have mislaid something.  Kitto tells us that the ancient Greeks were god-fearing and lived with deep respect for the pantheon.  Yet we who inherit the Judaeo-Christian tradition might think that the Greeks and their gods took their moral duties lightly.  This is not true.

To grasp the spiritual views of the Greeks we need to do a time jump into a part of history where most natural phenomena were explained in terms of the gods.  With this kind of ‘closeness’, it was not difficult to conceive of the gods appearing amongst people like mortals and having relationships with them, sometimes intimate liaisons.  They were, in the words of Kitto, seen as ‘sublimated kings’.

Apollo

The important thing for the Greeks was to show reverence in their rituals.  With this ‘closeness’ to the gods it was, of course, easier to offend them.  Many a tragedy was explained in terms of angry gods.  Generally speaking, there was a certain tolerance in the colonies from a polytheistic perspective.  The Romans, following the Greeks, devised a law cuius religio, eius religio  –  each to his own religion.  As time when by, the tolerance faded, often in brutal and savage ways.   After 300 a.d. Christianity became the official religion of the Mediterranean world.  The intolerance was reversed and few Greco-Roman temples survived. 

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

September, 2022  (11.9)

Source

H.D.F. Kitto:  The Greeks  (Penguin Books, London. 1951)

Image:  source lost

Re-reading the Greek myths

I am intrigued by the way people see their religion today and how the ancient Greeks saw their religion, the world of their gods.  In those times, Thebes and surrounding cities had a conservative vision of religion while the other Greek cities did not.  Zeus and the Olympian gods had in relatively recent times committed a cosmic coup d’état, usurping former gods, presumably the Titans.  While the gods had supernatural powers, they were disturbingly like human beings.  They were vengeful, compassionate, loving, jealous, hateful, power-grubbing … the list goes on.  Does knowing this make a believer critical of these gods?  While the monotheistic Hebrews had perfection in their metaphysics, it did not seem important to the ancient Greeks.

Zeus had frequent ‘love adventures’, as Graves calls them, among mortal women.  One of these adventures was with Alcmene, a mortal and the betrothed of Amphitryon.  Zeus disguised himself as her husband-to-be and nine months later she became the mother of Heracles.  Strictly speaking then, Heracles was illegitimate, but it would seem that anything goes when there is a god in the making.

Either Heracles or Odysseus

Heracles, it seems, was to be the greatest of the heroes, but becoming a god is not easy.  The goddess Hera, after whom Heracles was named, was jealous of the liaison with Alcmene and in the course of Heracles’s life, she would cause him to lose his mind and to mistake the children he had had with Megara as enemies and put them to the sword.  But his love for his own children had been well known and so a different version of the myth rose:  enemies, under the guise of harmless guests at the house of Heracles, had killed them. 

I can’t help wondering how the Greeks saw this and articulated it to themselves in their spiritual lives.  Perhaps these myths, probably seen as history, were cautionary tales, morality plays, cosmic soap operas.  Western cultures have in the last thousand years revived these tales which are now central to our education.  In the 20^th-century, the myths would be used by psychologists and philosophers to formulate profound concepts.   They are epics, often dealing with the timeless themes of tragedy and triumph.  It is out of this metaphysic that the great dramatic art of ancient Greece arises.  

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

September, 2022   

Source

Robert Graves:  The Greek Myths 2  (Penguin Books,  London. 1955) 

Image: source lost