That wrinkles will devour.
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died, young and fair.
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord have mercy on us."
Thomas Nashe, A Litany in Time of Plague, 1593
“The dead will lie on open fields,
like sheaves behind the reaper,
with no one to gather them.
So let not the wise boast of their wisdom
or the strong boast of their strength
or the wealthy boast of their riches,
but let the one who boasts boast about this:
that they have sought the understanding of my ways."
Jeremiah 9:22-24
"The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead."
W. B. Yeats, Leda and the Swan, 1933
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
"In the end the only real tragedy is not to have been a saint."
Léon Bloy, La Femme Pauvre, 1897
Some days I just don't have the word.
The next 24 months will be pivotal.
I hope I live to see a virtuous resolution for this noisome morass of political and financial corruption.
Have a pleasant evening.
