June 15, 2004
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Kierkegaard on death:
“I have thought too much about death not to know that he cannot
speak earnestly about death who does not know how to employ (for
awakening, please note) the subtlety and all the profound waggery which
lies in death. Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal
is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity
for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached
from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but
together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be,
utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all
captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”– Works of Love,
Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324For more on “the thought of the eternal,” see the discussion of the number 373 in Directions Out and Outside the World, both of 4/26/04.
“… as an inscription over the graveyard gate one could place ‘No compulsion here’ or ‘With us there is no compulsion.’ “
– Works of Love,
Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324“In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and
small brother and I were in Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A
hot wind blew through that summer…. There was not much to do….
There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’
Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The
rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer
watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.We
went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the
darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that
summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John
Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell a girl in a
picture called War of the Wildcats
that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the
cottonwoods grow.’ As it happened I did not grow up to be the
kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I
have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many
places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they
have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods
grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain
forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.… When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he
had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive
it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by
venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another
world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case
existed no more: a place where a man could move free. could make his
own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to
do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and
find himself home free, not in a hospital with something wrong inside,
not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced
smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the
cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”– Joan Didion,
“John Wayne: A Love Song,” 1965“He is home now. He is free.”
– Ron Reagan, Friday, June 11, 2004
“Beware, therefore, of the dead! Beware of his kindness;
beware of his definiteness, beware of his strength; beware of his
pride! But if you love him, then remember him lovingly, and learn
from him, precisely as one who is dead, learn the kindness in thought,
the definiteness in expression, the strength in unchangeableness, the
pride in life which you would not be able to learn as well from any
human being, even the most highly gifted.”– Works of Love,
Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 328
