Tag: Death
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Mahler and Life and Death
I haven’t blogged for a good few days because I’ve been too ‘re-absorbed’ in the music of one of my three favourite composers, Gustav Mahler, and now I’d like to write something about Mahler and death. I hope you haven’t fled away from that last word, because it’ll catch up with you regardless so, if […]
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Rethinking Jesus (15) My (current) Conclusions …
Firstly, there is the Jesus of History. I’ve had to acknowledge the fact that he had a view of the world which is different from mine, including beliefs I don’t share. For example, being a Jew, he believed in circumcision, in observing the sabbath day, (even if not in the inflexible, box-ticking way of others), […]
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Rethinking ‘God’ (2) ‘The Dark Side of the Force’
It seems to me that the advance of science, with its thoroughly empirical basis, experimentally verifiable research, and massively impressive results, is one factor that’s led, in western Europe, to a steady decline in the relevance to most people of institutional religion. The latter has not assisted its cause, when it has mounted fruitless and […]
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FROM “Pensées by Bryan Magee”
Philosopher, author, broadcaster (1930-2019) “One of the most reliable signs that you need a holiday is the conviction that you cannot spare the time to take one.” “People’s assumptions about you tell you a great deal about them.” “We can never be sure that something is right, though we can be sure that something is […]
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And Death shall have No Dominion (Dylan Thomas)
This is one of Dylan Thomas’s earliest poems, and one that he loved to speak out loud (loud meaning loud). It’s about what, if anything, is likely to happen to us after we die. There are two Biblical references. One of these gives us the title, and the 1st and 9th lines of each of […]
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Poem on his Birthday (part iii) – Dylan Thomas
Stanza 9. The struggle between belief in God and undermining doubt continues from stanza 8, where Thomas ‘prays .. faithlessly to Him‘. The ‘young Heaven’s fold‘ of stanza 7 is now ‘old and air shaped‘ like a blown up balloon, thin-skinned and liable to burst, especially if threatened by ‘souls‘, like Thomas’s, ever disposed to […]
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Poem on his Birthday (part i) – Dylan Thomas
Stanza 1. In this poem, it’s Thomas’s ‘thirty-fifth‘ birthday. It’s just another ‘sandgrain‘ day in the ongoing hourglass of his life, except that it’s the half-way point in the Biblically allotted ‘three score years and ten’. The ‘mustardseed sun‘, however, the small, orange sun of late October, is more than three-quarters of the way along […]
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Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night (Dylan Thomas)
I sometimes quote a favourite Joseph Campbell saying, “Follow your bliss”. My bliss, at the moment, is Dylan Thomas. Having written 3 successive posts, I’ve decided to delete and update 2 previous ones. “Do Not Go Gentle” is a counterpart to the “Elegy”, both having to do with his father. “Elegy”, which I recently wrote […]
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