Death and Mourning

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by you only regret that you didn’t see him do it.

When I reflect upon the number ofdisagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.

[ Deleted dedication of Twain’s book RoughingIt:] To the Late Cain, This Book is Dedicated, Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on accountof sympathy with him, for his bloody deedplaced him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking; but out of a mere humancommiseration for him in that it was hismisfortune to live in a dark age that knew notthe beneficent Insanity Plea.

[ After the death of President Franklin D.Roosevelt :] When they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

I die because I do not die.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.

Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

Lie quiet Divus.

In her sepulchre there by the sea,

Dying

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

We are condemned

No doubt the nearness of death and the brotherhood of men-at-arms, at whatever time and in whatever country, always produces an atmosphere favorable to the extraordinary, to all that rises above the human condition and breaks the circle of solitude that surrounds each one of us.

One day Lara went out and did not come back. . . . She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid.

We shall die alone.

[ On being warned by her doctor that if she didn’t stop drinking she would be dead within a month :] Promises, promises!

[ Her suggested epitaph for herself :] Excuse My Dust.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.