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Souvenirs De Nos Peres  (Memories Of Our Fathers)

a great title--a peter frampton song....

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In the life of a man, his time is but a moment.... his sense, a dim rushlight. All that is body is as coursing waters.... all that is of the soul, as dreams, and vapors. --

Many grains of frankincense on the same altar;  one falls before, another after-- it makes no difference.

 Marcus Aurelius

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                                                                   JOE HELLER


True Story, Word of Honor

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer, now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.

I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel to know that your host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel, Catch-22, has made in its entire history?"

And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."

And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"

And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."

Not Bad!  Rest in Peace!

                                                                           Kurt Vonnegut
                                                                The New Yorker, May 16, 2005       

Lawrence Durrell

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LAWRENCE Durrell:

Pursewarden:

I always believed in letting my reader sink or skim...

Lord Buckley

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 Lord Buckley: There's a magnificent pylon in this, there's a torch for the world: that life cannot be as beautiful as it should be. We have the blocks to make up the mosaic of life: the dream - a beautiful, wonderful, warm, unendingly delightful schematic of living. This is the truth. We have all these things to put them together. But the pylon that describes the torch of the world is Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin." The story of the broken promise ...

 Lady Elizabeth Buckley: We were having fun having hard times. That was his secret. He knew how to turn anything around. Most people don't realize you have to work very hard to have good times.

The next day the Chicago Tribune ran a more lengthy review: That old saw, "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em," readily applies to the performance Lord Richard Buckley presents once each night in Alan Ribback's Gate of Horn, Chicago Avenue and Dearborn Street.

Lord Buckley: It has been a most precious pleasure to have temporarily strolled in the garden of your affection.

Mort Fega: I feel really privileged to have had the opportunity to speak at his funeral. I'd had no time to prepare my remarks, so I'm convinced that Lord Buckley was whispering in my ear as I concluded my homage with this wonderfully appropriate quote of his, "The flowers, the gorgeous, mystic, multi colored flowers are not the flowers of life, but people, yes people, are the true flowers of life. And it has been a most precious privilege to have temporarily strolled in your garden."

Shel Silverstein: Lord Buckley would come in at night, dressed in an old beautiful suit, a fresh flower in his lapel, gracious to all, with hugs, with deep laughs and strange sighs, always gentle, always uneven in the rambling levels of his midnight confrontation with demons and saints. He was vulnerable to near perfection. A quiet legend even before his time was over, he died of starvation and thoughtlessness during the attempt by the city police of New York to prevent people without cabaret cards from making a living, from working at the only thing they knew how to do. This brutality of spirit, inherent in red tape and in the affairs of the state, was the very thing he could not cope with. It is the antithesis of love. And Lord Buckley’s life was full of love

Lord Buckley: Love is the international understanding that each and every one of us exactly the same problems to fight.

Lord Buckley: What a great thing it is to be alive. My Lords my Ladies ... would it embarrass you very much if I were to tell you that ... I love you? It embarrasses you, doesn’t it?

Lord Buckley: It is the duty of any given nation in time of high crisis to attack the catastrophe that faces it in such a manner as to cause the people to laugh at it in such a way that they do not die before they get killed.

Lord Buckley: Make the most of all that comes. Make the least of all that goes.



.

---

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The lock the past has on the present

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" Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."


The dead are my dark matter filling up palpably spaces in my heart and in my world. All my dead are alive in me, alive for me, for whom the past has becvome a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me--yet lost except in my frail after-world. 

For me, my dead live like the music I can play from old recordings. Bud Powell and Charlie alive in my ears, alive, certainly in my heart and brain are the memories of Grandpa, Dad and Mother. Spencer, Greenberg, Hal, Mr. Moody, even Mr. Sherwood and his musical cane of the PS3 playground of evening. As long as I live, they do.

____________________________________

Even if young, youth is behind them and with it, their zest for exploration and combat. 

________________

Meum and Tuum--Mine and Yours.

________________

Ideals coming from the pulpit or the lecture stand, not the mind. 

_________________

Fanatical Vigilance.
Moral Obsessions
Harsh Partisan Restraint
Unbreakable belief in bleak and narrow views 
It's not the know how-- it's the know who.

_________________________

"There's a simple rule about temper--
if you can't lose it with one person,
you'll lose it with another. "

Howard Jacobson--"Kalooki Nights" 

Call me Ismael...

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 "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

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Even if young, youth is behind them, and with it some of their zest for exploration and combat.

---------------------------------

meum and Tuum -- mine and yours.

--------------------------------

Ideals coming from the pulpit or the lectern, not the heart not the mind..

___________________________________

Fanatical vigilance,
moral obsessions,
Gusto and Passion,
harsh partisan,
unbreakable belief in bleak and narrow views.

______________________________

The dead are my dark matter, filling up palpably
 the empty spaces of my world and
my heart.

_____________________
As long as my heart beats and my brain pulses back these will live: My Dad and Mother, Spencer, Greenberg, Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Max, Jack and Irma Pollack, Murray Getz, even Mr Sherwood and his magical musical cane in the evening P.S. 3 schoolyard will live on. Brenda and Frank Briggs, Kenny Lippman, Paul Smith, Lenny Lambert, Hal, Stanley, even his wife Sydel, Danny Salvatore, Michael and Patricia Avedon, Steve Mantudis, Mr. Harold A. Moody, Harold Clausen, Mrs. Calderwood, Jonathan Mitchel, Gabriel Song,
Jackie the Grocer/Bookie, Jackie Adelman, the Baker, Jimmy Bell-- the bookmaker in the phone booth, Grandma Iverson, Aunt Sally, Aunt Nancy, Shapiro, Mark Dones, Dr. Dollen, Nurse Blodgett, Dr. Gratwick, Harry "Dutch" Blumenthal, Cappy,

What a crowd and I haven't even started.

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"All I ask is the chance to prove that money won't buy happiness."

Spike Mulligan  

"Death and exile are best met alone--"

Napoleon 

 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Shea 

Lord and Lady Shea were the couple who brought my Grandmother, Inga Iverson, a Norwegian teenager, to the Bahamas when she was 15 or 16.

At the time Lord Shea was Governor of the Bahamas.

Nana (Grandma) had been working in London as a helper in a “lying In” hospital (Maternity Hospital.)

In the Bahamas she took care of their baby. This led to her career as a Governess. She worked for several

families including the Marshall Field family of Chicago. I have a photograph of her holding the Marshall Field baby while both were wearing yards of Irish Lace. It seems to have been taken prior to a baptism.

Grandma spoke impeccable English with a slight hint of a Scandinavian accent

that could be detected only by those who listened for it.  

She became friends with another Governess, Olivia Collins,  who was Governess for the Bouvier Family, including Jackie.

Somewhere I have a Birthday letter that Jackie sent to Miss Collins at the end of her life, when she was staying with my mother in Forest Hills. My brother, Joe,  told me that she was a crackerjack poker player.

At the time of the letter, John Kennedy had been elected President, but not yet inaugurated. The letter came from an address in Georgetown.

,m  

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"Don't build fences. You may trip over them."

Madame X,  1937..

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This is from Huffington Post, a series of quotes from Garcia Marquez.  I’ll write some quotes, but not the titles where found.


“No, not rich.  I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

“He who awaits much can expect little.”

“A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”

“Sex is the consolation your have when you can’t have love.”

“I discovered to my joy, that it is life, not death, that has no limits.”

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”

“A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”

“Freedom is often the first casualty of war.”

“Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”

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Knowledge is Power


"A Prince will not undergo the difficulty of understanding must undergo the danger of trusting." 


Marquess of Halifax 

Applies to me...

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"When I smell the flowers I look for the corpse."
Robert Gates

Life is carried on in its natural state which is, according to Thomas Hobbes,
"Nasty, Brutish and Short." 

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How do we know that we have really, truly and irreversibly reached "middle age"? That, as Joseph Brodsky put it, "we have gone over half," no matter what our physical age? On the surface of which cold and hard blade does the notion sink into our hearts? Is it by the hardening of the membranes of our social cells, which suddenly absorb so much more selectively of books and music, ideas and people? Or is it in suddenly knowing people who are dead—more and more every year?

As the living markers of our lives tumble down and become memories, of which we are increasingly sole custodians, what of the piercing sadness of those increasingly frequent mornings when the irretrievably departed faces and places, words and gestures flood the leaky boats of our minds and it's a wonder we manage to launch ourselves to work?

Whatever the symptoms, so much needs to be thought through, adjusted to and coped with, and as always we look to great art for companionship and solace and perhaps even a guideline or two.

In this quest we must not overlook a small gem: "Elegia" (Elegy), a short poem by Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837).

The key creator of modern literary Russian, Pushkin is the author of such superb long poems as "The Prisoner of Caucasus," "The Gypsies," "The Fountain of Bakhchisaray," "The Bronze Horseman" and, of course, the glorious "novel in verse" "Eugene Onegin." He has also given us the lean prose, golden and translucent like Baltic Sea amber, of "The Captain's Daughter," "The Tales of Belkin" and "The Queen of Spades." He wrote the drama "Boris Godunov," as well as "Mozart and Salieri," "The Miserly Knight," "The Stone Guest" and "A Feast During the Plague," the last four compressed by the enormous weight of Pushkin's talent into the diamonds of one-act "little tragedies."

But to the Russians Pushkin is first and foremost the author of short lyrical poems, many known by heart by every educated Russian. Almost two centuries later, they are still the brightest stars in the firmament of Russian belle-lettres. In Vladimir Nabokov's superb autobiographical novel, "The Gift," the main character "fed on Pushkin" and "inhaled Pushkin." "The reader of Pushkin has the capacity of his lungs enlarged," Nabokov wrote.

Written on Sept. 8, 1830—autumn being Pushkin's favorite season, to which he penned several odes and during which he was often almost inhumanely productive, usually lying in bed till noon, filling a notebook propped on his knees—"Elegia" was created at the very end of the six-year period between 1824 and 1830 in which he wrote his finest lyrical poetry. (In later years Pushkin largely shifted to prose and histories). Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, the author of the finest one-volume history of Russian literature from the 10th to early 20th century, called these short poems "a body of lyric verse unapproached in Russian and unsurpassed in any poetry." Their beauty, Svyatopolk-Mirsky continued, is austere, largely free from metaphor or imagery—a classic "Greek beauty" that depended so much on what's left unsaid as on what is said, and "on choice of words, on the adequacy of rhythm and intonation," and "on the complex texture of sound—a wonderful alliteratio Pushkiniana, so elusive and so all-conditioning."

The two sestets (six-line stanzas) of "Elegia" are meticulously metered and rhymed. The meter is an iambic pentameter: five rhythmically stressed syllables on each line, with stress on the second syllable. The rhyme scheme is AABBCC, with feminine rhymes (the rhymed syllables are penultimate on the line) alternating with masculine ones at the end of the line.

None of the existing translations is anywhere near the original. So here's my attempt at what Nabokov called a "lexical," or literal translation.

Thirty-one years old at the time—and, by contemporary life expectancy, having gone well "over half"—Pushkin begins with a merciless probing of middle-age angst:

The burnt-out gaiety of reckless years

Lies heavy on me like a bleary hangover.

But, like wine, the sadness of the bygone days

In my soul grows stronger the older it is.

My path is bleak. Labor and sorrow is promised me

By the future's churning sea.

Is this all? Wouldn't, then, death be welcome, or at least, unobjectionable? Not quite.

But I don't want, o my friends, to die;

In the case of Pushkin, who was notoriously and recklessly brave in duels and, at least once, on a battlefield in the Caucasus, the desire to live is far more than the fear of death. There follows a magical line: "Greek," in Svyatopolk-Mirsky's sense of the word, but not only in its laconic austerity but also in its bottomless oracular depth:

I want to live to think and to suffer.

Then, on the reader still despairing over the first stanza, Pushkin bestows what is almost certainly among the shortest and most powerful inventory of life's immutable treasures penned by a poet:

I know there shall be enjoyments for me

Amid sorrows, cares and anxieties:

At times I again will be intoxicated by harmony,

Weep over my fantasy's creation,

And perhaps on my sad sunset

Love will shine its farewell smile.

In the six years he had left to live (Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel in January 1837), the poet would again unflinchingly confront the reality of the human condition yet continue to hold out the "blessings" still available to him (and us). "There is no happiness on earth yet there is peace and freedom," he wrote in "'Tis time, my friend, 'tis time" (1834). Whether one was subject to the despotism of the czar (in Russia) or the vagaries of the crowd's moods (in Western democracies), one was still able to "admire the divine beauties of Nature and to feel one's soul melt in the glow of man's inspired design" ("From Pindemonte," 1836, translated by Nabokov).

But there would never be another poem like "Elegia"—filled as beautifully with so concentrated a dose of bitter truth, the courage to meet it head-on, and the hope that art, work and love make life worth our while even on the downslope.

Thank you, Alexander Sergeyevich.

Mr.Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is "Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991" (Yale University Press, 2012).

Basil Bunting

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"You idiot! What makes you think decay will
Never stink from your skin?"

Basil Bunting  a poet of Pound's time...

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 It’s rather as Walker Percy put it:

 "Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust."