Click image to enlarge.

The "Boy's Life" illustration is of an Arthur C. Clarke story, "Against the Fall of Night." This, according to the review quoted below, was Clarke's first story, begun in 1936 and first published in 1948. The title is from a poem by A. E. Housman, "Smooth Between Sea and Land." See Log24 on the Feast of St. Mark, 2003.

From a book review by Christopher B. Jones:

"Against the Fall of Night describes well how it often takes youth to bring forth change. The older mind becomes locked in a routine, or blocks out things because it has been told that it shouldn't think or talk about them. But the young mind is ever the explorer, seeking out knowledge without the taboos placed on it by a rigid society. Alvin is a breath of fresh air in the don't-look-over-the-wall society of Diaspar.

Myths play a big role, and an interesting religious overtone pervades the story with a long since departed being whose origins are unknown and who played an important part in Earth's past. Parallels to Jesus can easily be drawn, and the forecast shown for the longevity of religions in general seems to me to be rather accurate....

Finally, when Alvin uncovers part of the truth he has been looking for, he learns of the dangers and stagnation that can befall a xenophobic society. There are still a few such societies in the world today, and this characteristic almost always comes with negative effects-- even if it has been cultivated with the intention to protect."

An example of such a xenophobic society is furnished by the Hadassah ad currently running in the New York Times obituaries section: "Who will say Kaddish in Israel?"

Another example:

Tom Stoppard, in the London Times of Sunday, March 16, 2008, on the social unrest of forty years ago in 1968--

"Altering the psyche was supposed to change the social structure but, as a Marxist, Max knows it really works the other way: changing the social structure is the only way to change the psyche. The idea that 'make love, not war' is a more practical slogan than 'workers of the world unite' is as airy-fairy as the I Ching."

Airy-fairy, Jewey-phooey.

Clarke's 1948 story was the basis of his 1956 novel, The City and the Stars. In memory of the star Richard Widmark, here are two illustrations from St. Mark's Day, 2003:

Housman asks the reader
to tell him of runes to grave
or bastions to design
"against the fall of night."

Here, as examples, are
one rune and one bastion.

"... they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail....

They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was... it was the most important thing that I ever experienced."

-- Julie Taymor,
"Skewed Mirrors" interview

Here is some further commentary on the words of that entry--

On the phrase "Within You Without You"-- the title of a song by George Harrison:

"Bernard’s understanding of reality connects to this idea of 'flow': he sees reality as a product of consciousness. He rejects the idea of an 'outer' world of unchanging objects and an 'inner' world of the mind and ideas. Rather, our minds are part of the world, and vice versa."

-- Adrien Ardoin, SparkNote on
    Virginia Woolf's The Waves

On "Death and the Apple Tree"-- the title of the previous entry-- in The Waves:

"The apple tree Neville is looking at as he overhears the servants at the school discussing a local murder becomes inextricably linked to his knowledge of death. Neville finds himself unable to pass the tree, seeing it as glimmering and lovely, yet sinister and 'implacable.' When he learns that Percival is dead, he feels he is face to face once again with 'the tree which I cannot pass.' Eventually, Neville turns away from the natural world to art, which exists outside of time and can therefore transcend death. The fruit of the tree appears only in Neville’s room on his embroidered curtain, a symbol itself of nature turned into artifice. The apple tree image also echoes the apple tree from the Book of Genesis in the Bible, the fruit of which led Adam and Eve to knowledge and, therefore, expulsion from Eden."

-- Adrien Ardoin, op. cit.

1997’s surprise best-seller, Cold Mountain, is the first novel of North Carolina native and travel writer, Charles Frazier. Two ancient Greek authors shape and drive the novel, set in the post-war Southern Appalachians of 1865. Homer's Odyssey frames the novel: the hero Inman undergoes epic adventures after the war, has his own Penelope waiting, and travels back to a land as remote as any island, Cold Mountain, North Carolina. But fragments of an anonymous philosopher who can be identified as Heraclitus alienate Inman from the Homeric world around him and determine his fate. Ada, his Penelope, also casts off her shroud of tradition: impatient with the 'glorious war,' no longer content to wait, Ada plunges into the new business of living. And just as the archaic, post-Homeric Greek world produced new ways of living and thought, as exemplified by Heraclitus, so too does the post-bellum world of Cold Mountain, as exemplified by Inman and Ada; their struggle, and the novel's tension, speak to and about all those caught between two worlds, epic and philosophic, whether driven by love or strife."