The warning that Jacob Marley’s ghost gave to Scrooge

A lonely boy was reading by a feeble fire

For those of you who celebrate the other holiday, on December 25 — and for those of you who don’t — and for me.

This entry repeats Charles Dickens’s warning, in A Christmas Carol, that a spirit can doom itself to “witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.”

(from) A Christmas Carol
by
Charles Dickens

“Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”

“Man of the worldly mind!” replied the Ghost, “do you believe in me or not?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”

Giving advice to the young — according to Thoreau and to Emerson

Henry David Thoreau, in one of his famously crusty moods, gave some famously negative advice in Walden about accepting advice from those who are older:

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young.

I’m sure he intended this to be taken seriously — after all he did think it’s important for each person to break from the past and to re-invent himself — but I’m not sure he meant it to be taken literally. After all, how straight would I read someone who also remarks the following, very dryly, tongue in cheek?

It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

Thoreau’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said something perhaps wiser — or at least more explicit.

More Rupert Brooke: “The Great Lover”

This is an addition to yesterday’s post, Rupert Brooke’s “Tiare Tahiti.”

The Great Lover
by
Rupert Brooke

I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,

Rupert Brooke’s “Tiare Tahiti”

Rupert Brooke

Tiare Tahiti

Mamua, when our laughter ends,
And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
Are dust about the doors of friends,
Or scent ablowing down the night,
Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
Comes our immortality.

Allen Ginsberg’s “America”

Note: this post is an extension of my About page.

Allen Ginsberg in 1960 by Mario Jorrin/Getty Images

YouTube: Photomontage of Ginsberg and his “america” music by Tom Waits. Incredibly moving.

America
by
Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.

Thoreau: a “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms”

Note: this post is an extension of my About page.

from Walden
by
Henry David Thoreau

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.

Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

Note: this post extends my About page.

Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley
by Amelia Curran (1819)

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley

[Composed, probably, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. Published in Hunt’s “Examiner”, January 19, 1817, and with “Rosalind and Helen”, 1819.]

1.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,–visiting

Sherlock Holmes — on imagination

On my About page, I present quotations and images that—like the ones at the top of the sidebar to the left—suggest the importance of imagination, inspiration, imagery, art.

There is some dialogue in the film of The Hound of the Baskervilles that, for me, also expresses this perfectly.