Log24

This post was suggested by …

A death last Sunday and a Harvard Crimson  story today.

Related images —

From last Sunday …

From an author who reportedly died on Oct. 31 (Halloween) …

(Midnight in the Garden, continued)

E is for Ending …

Cullinane = Cullinan + E

And for Everlast.

(The Cullinan link above is to a woman
who apparently is the wife of writer
Alan Cowell. See The Revisiting, Dec. 3rd.)

For Kristen

"'Ain’t No Grave' is Johnny’s final studio recording. The album and its title track
deal heavily with themes of mortality, resurrection, and everlasting life.
The Johnny Cash Project pays tribute to these themes."

And  sells products!

Click image to enlarge.

I prefer "And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."

For a father figure, a post suggested by tonight's obituary of Jackie Cooper—

Image thanks to Conrad H. Roth's "The E at Delphi"—

Link thanks to Clint Eastwood—

E is for Everlast.

"What a fellowship…"

Happy birthday, Iris.

“The letter acts like a signifier precisely to the extent that its function in the story does not require that its meaning be revealed.”

— Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference,” an essay on a story by Poe

The Way of the Pilgrim,
Part III:
 
For the Birthday
of C. S. Lewis

The Tao, Chapter I

“The Chinese… speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.”

— C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man

“In his preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis says the novel has a serious point that he has tried to make in this little book, The Abolition of Man.  The novel is a work of fantasy or science fiction, while Abolition is a short philosophical work about moral education, but as we shall see the two go together; we will understand either book better by having read and thought about the other.”

— Dale Nelson, Notes on The Abolition of Man

“In Epiphany Term, 1942, C.S. Lewis delivered the Riddell Memorial Lectures… in….  the University of Durham….  He delivered three lectures entitled ‘Men without Chests,’ ‘The Way,’ and ‘The Abolition of Man.’  In them he set out to attack and confute what he saw as the errors of his age. He started by quoting some fashionable lunacy from an educationalists’ textbook, from which he developed a general attack on moral subjectivism.  In his second lecture he argued against various contemporary isms, which purported to replace traditional objective morality.  His final lecture, ‘The Abolition of Man,’ which also provided the title of the book published the following year, was a sustained attack on hard-line scientific anti-humanism. The intervening fifty years have largely vindicated Lewis.”

— J. R. Lucas, The Restoration of Man

Requiem

Some links for Grete Sultan, 1906-2005, a pianist who died at 99 on Sunday morning a week ago– June 26, 2005:

Album with sound clips — The Legacy, Vol. 1

Album with Tantum Ergo — The Legacy, Vol. 2

The musical version of Tantum Ergo on the second Sultan album is by composer

Tui St. George Tucker,

1924-2004.  Her Requiem apparently premiered

at Appalachian State University on April 30, 2005.

For other material on theology and Appalachian State University, see

that day’s Log24 entries

and also the April 25 entry,

Mathematical Style.

For more on music, theology, and Appalachia, see

the entries of Sunday, July 25, 2004.

From Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column of June 9, 2002:

“The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the National Gallery of Art.”

To order, see the
Amazing Music Box & Gifts Company.

We Call This Friday Good

— T. S. Eliot

As a Little Child

Today’s birthdays:

Francis Ford Coppola and
Russell Crowe.

From MindfulGroup.com:

Dead Poet in
the City of Angels

Lyricist Eddy Marnay died Friday, Jan. 3, 2003.
Relevant Log24.net entries:

• January 3, 2003
• November 7, 2002
• September 12, 2002
• December 21, 2002

Certain themes recur in these entries.  To describe such recurrent themes, in art and in life, those enamoured of metaphors from physics may ponder the phrase
“implicate order.”

For an illustration of at least part of the
implicate order,
click here.

Another name for the implicate order is, of course, the Tao:

“The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Santa’s Wit

Edmund Gwenn, actor, died on September 6, 1959.

When asked if he thought dying was tough, Gwenn reportedly said,

“Yes, it’s tough, but not as tough as doing comedy.”

This may or may not be true; if it is, Gwenn may be the true source of a quotation variously attributed to Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, David Garrick, Donald Wolfit, William Holden, and Groucho Marx, Marcel Marceau, Noel Coward, and Oscar Wilde:  

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

A very dubious version of the Gwenn story attributes the “comedy is hard” part to Jack Lemmon:

The lesson is best illustrated in a story involving Jack Lemmon, whose best work was in comedy. He visited the British actor Edmund Gwenn, suffering in a hospital. Gwenn is said to have lifted the flap on the oxygen tent and said, ”It’s really tough to die.” And Lemmon responded, ”It’s not as tough as doing comedy.”
— Elvis Mitchell in The New York Times Week in Review, Sunday, August 25, 2002

David Bruce, an English instructor at Ohio University, supplies another version of the Gwenn story, from Movie Anecdotes, by Peter Hay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990:

Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar playing Santa Claus in the movie Miracle on 34 Street. As he lay dying, Jack Lemmon visited him and asked if dying was dead. [sic]  Gwenn replied, “Oh, it’s hard, very hard indeed. But not as hard as doing comedy.”

Santa might appreciate the above misprint, as would Vladimir Nabokov…

“Life Everlasting–based on a misprint!”
— Pale Fire 

and John Donne…

“And death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die.”
— Holy Sonnets