Thursday, January 14, 2016

R. I. P., Alan Rickman


More sad news to add to the start of this year. First David Bowie, and now Alan Rickman. Both 69, both died of cancer.

Rickman was simply one of the greatest actors of our time. And a great humanist. Marvelous actor, marvelous man. Why do such beautiful people have to go, while monsters like Dick Cheney still walk about? 

Here's an obituary from The Guardian. And a beautiful tribute to him by his friend Katherine Viner.

And here's an excerpt from the poem "Rugby Chapel" by Matthew Arnold:
What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?—
Most men eddy about
Here and there—eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and then they die—
Perish;—and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves,
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

And there are some, whom a thirst
Ardent, unquenchable, fires,
Not with the crowd to be spent,
Not without aim to go round
In an eddy of purposeless dust,
Effort unmeaning and vain.
Ah yes! some of us strive
Not without action to die
Fruitless, but something to snatch
From dull oblivion, nor all
Glut the devouring grave!