The last word sounded like the first word, except tinged with an unexpected sadness.
To have the last word.
...
On the highest point of Cavalry Bridge, you look down and out, to the cosmos of bright lights, constant gold and fine silver, sky blues and sweet purple, flickering uncertain orange. It is as if each is burning in its own time zone, distinct, singular, isolated, blazing against the darkness; at the same time, they seem to merge into a sea that is light and flowing, a sea whose forward movement catches the various lights on its surface like so much flotsam, as it swells up and down, like a living monster.
Inside your own car, your little zone, you hear nothing of the traffic, the world outside, but only see these mysterious lights, like unknown beings, merge and separate. And Gorecki, which you turn up to catch the perfect pitch of loneliness. Gosh, you could have been on acid!
No-one knows what the last word is or will be. You might think you do or think you'll say it later, but time doesn't stand still for any of us, doesn't give us that moment to compose our thoughts and words.
Stokowski is a wise man. Originality is a response to the conditions of life...to appreciate originality one must have an original mind oneself. The word that crops up again and again in the interview: life. Life, full of contradictions, open to revision.
~~~
The last word between us slipped away like a seal, without anyone ever seeing it.
Nothing he said was remembered; nothing he did
was fact or legend
in the village square
yet later they would memorize the word
he spoke that morning, just before he died;
the word for death, perhaps, or meadow grass,
or swimming to the surface of his mind,
that other word they used, when he was young,
for all they knew that nobody remembered.
---John Burnside.
~~~
....
We speak as others have spoken before us. And a sense of language is also a feeling for ways of living that have meant something.
---Rush Rhees.
To have the last word.
...
On the highest point of Cavalry Bridge, you look down and out, to the cosmos of bright lights, constant gold and fine silver, sky blues and sweet purple, flickering uncertain orange. It is as if each is burning in its own time zone, distinct, singular, isolated, blazing against the darkness; at the same time, they seem to merge into a sea that is light and flowing, a sea whose forward movement catches the various lights on its surface like so much flotsam, as it swells up and down, like a living monster.
Inside your own car, your little zone, you hear nothing of the traffic, the world outside, but only see these mysterious lights, like unknown beings, merge and separate. And Gorecki, which you turn up to catch the perfect pitch of loneliness. Gosh, you could have been on acid!
No-one knows what the last word is or will be. You might think you do or think you'll say it later, but time doesn't stand still for any of us, doesn't give us that moment to compose our thoughts and words.
Stokowski is a wise man. Originality is a response to the conditions of life...to appreciate originality one must have an original mind oneself. The word that crops up again and again in the interview: life. Life, full of contradictions, open to revision.
~~~
The last word between us slipped away like a seal, without anyone ever seeing it.
Nothing he said was remembered; nothing he did
was fact or legend
in the village square
yet later they would memorize the word
he spoke that morning, just before he died;
the word for death, perhaps, or meadow grass,
or swimming to the surface of his mind,
that other word they used, when he was young,
for all they knew that nobody remembered.
---John Burnside.
~~~
....
We speak as others have spoken before us. And a sense of language is also a feeling for ways of living that have meant something.
---Rush Rhees.
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