Hope of Heaven
“Heaven is a state,
a sort of metaphysical state.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938
“The old men know
when an old man dies.”
— Ogden Nash
See also the five Log24 entries
ending with the 9 PM entry of
Tuesday, December 10, 2002.
From today’s New York Times:
“Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, whose memoir, Passages to Freedom, chronicled his escape from a prison camp in Italy during World War II, died on Saturday in Morristown, N.J. He was 92.”
A web page on the Indiantown Gap army camp quotes Frelinghuysen’s Passages to Freedom… He is describing July 1942, just before Frelinghuysen’s unit was sent overseas:
“In the last week of July, his wife Emily came to Indiantown to stay at the old Hershey Hotel so they could steal a few of the remaining hours together. He explained, ‘On my last night with Emily, she wore an evening dress with a full green and rose colored skirt, and I put on my best garrison uniform …. we had California champagne, lobster, and flaming crepes with ice cream. We danced to some old tunes; Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ and Irving Berlin’s tunes from ‘Top Hat.’ Then they played a new one slowly, and a young girl sang the lyrics to ‘The White Cliffs of Dover.’ Noting that England had been at war for three years, he reminisced that it was a song that speaks of ‘love and laughter’ and ‘peace ever after.’ Nostalgically, he said, ‘We finished the dance in an embrace. She took my hand and we walked out through the lobby onto the terrace for a last look at the gardens in the pale light of a quarter moon.’ “
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love….”