In the Spirit of Halloween,...

Should you wish to visit the grave of horror writer Bram Stoker, his ashes share an urn with his son Noel’s, at Golders Green Crematorium in London, where an employee will escort them to the room where it is kept. (Fear of vandalism prevents the crematorium from placing it in the open.) Stoker, who in 1897 wrote Dracula,  may indirectly be responsible for America’s current vampire obsession. But he wasn’t terribly well known in his own time and died of either a series of strokes or syphilis in 1912.

Quote of the Day

It's not that I'm afraid to die, 

I just don't want to be there 

when it happens.

Woody Allen, 

Without Feathers, 1976

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
          
                                     -  John Updike

Mystic Blue

Out of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping, Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping. Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel. And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops. And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes, The rainbow arching over in the skies, New sparks of wonder opening in surprise. All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously, Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death we see.

- D H Lawrence (1916)