Both Hands Before the Fire

Left: Theodore Roosevelt As A Rough Rider
by Vincent Monozlay

Right: Robin Williams as Theodore Roosevelt
in Night at the Museum

**********

Not Roosevelt's last words, but very nobly spoken
merely a year before he himself died relatively young:

"My sorrow is so keen for the young who die
that the edge of my grief is blunted
when death comes to the old,
of my own generation;
for in the nature of things
we must soon die anyhow and we have
warmed both hands before the fire of life."

Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
October 27, 1858 ~ January 6, 1919 (aged 60)

**********
As Halloween approaches with its emphasis on honoring our ancestors,
let us contemplate the magnanimity of Roosevelt's observation, along with these words of wisdom from Keanu Reeves:

Stephen Colbert:
"What do you think happens when we die?"

Keanu Reeves:
"I know that the ones who love us will miss us."

My Niece Jessica's Awesome Firepit
[And My Nephew Aaron's ~ All Souls' Night]

House With a Past

Thank you old house for imparting your secrets!
I'm sure you remember Robin William, in Dead Poets Society, telling the students to listen closely to what the old photographs are whispering:

"But if you listen real close,
you can hear them whisper their legacy to you.
Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? - - Carpe - - hear it? - -
Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day!"
That's exactly the same feeling I get when browsing through all the old papers that came with the house.

As Walt Whitman writes in "Song of the Open Road":

You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs!
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me. . . .

Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you.
~ Selected lines from Parts 3 and 13 ~
These and more can be found on my
NEW FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST
~ House With a Past ~

The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

P.S. Related post on my book blog

8 June 2007