Category: Quotes & other trivia.

For Tomorrow.

Aftermath

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

Siegfried Sassoon

Winter.

For those who like a rather minimalist style: this musician requires further exploration and well worth the trouble……..

O winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.

He hears me not, but o’er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain’d, sheathed
In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes;
For he hath rear’d his sceptre o’er the world…..

Part of the poem Winter from from Poetical Sketches, 1783 William Blake. 

Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil).

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRXj31fXC2M

 

Facilis descensus Averni:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras.
hoc opus, hic labor est.



“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies”

Publius Vergilius Maro  (Virgil) 15th October 70 BC to 21st September 19 BC

I digress: The Higgs boson.

Peter Higgs and Francois Englert have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the theory of what came to be known as the Higgs boson.
A Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately after it pops into existence. Which is why it has taken so long to prove there is such a thing and probably the raison d’être for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

So what has this got to do with photography – nothing really, it’s just a passing interest that I have for Quantum Mechanics 🙂

This is a very good easy understanding of what all the fuss is about (A Video by CERN).

Reading Robert Frost.

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Robert Frost

Iain M Banks 1954 – 2013.

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word.

In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.

The Player of Games: Iain M Banks 1954 – 2013.

Two Poems by Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936.

I normally avoid comments on news, but looking at what has been happening over the last few days in UK; it brings to mind two poems by Rudyard Kipling:-

The Covenant

WE thought we ranked above the chance of ill.
Others might fall, not we, for we were wise –
merchants in freedom. So, of our free-will
we let our servants drug our strength with lies.
The pleasure and the poison had its way
on us as on the meanest, till we learned
that he who lies will steal, who steals will slay.
Neither God’s judgement nor man’s heart was turned.

Yet there remains His Mercy – to be sought
through wrath and peril till we cleanse the wrong
By that last right which our forefathers claimed
when their Law failed them and its stewards were bought.
This is our cause. God help us, and make strong
our will to meet Him later, unashamed!

 

The Beginnings

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
they were icy-willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.

Their voices were even and low,
their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd,
it was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.

It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.

Both the above poems by – RUDYARD KIPLING

1865-1936

William Shakespeare’s birth.

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register’d upon our brazen tombs
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
The endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge
And make us heirs of all eternity.

Love’s Labour’s Lost – W.S.
As no one really knows the exact date of William Shakespeare’s birth, although he was baptised on the 26 April 1564, and died on the 23 April 1616: It seems universally acknowledged that today is his birthday.

St George’s Day.

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven”.

Rupert Brooke.