A small collection of links.

Just a couple of things I find are vaguely on topic for my recent posts.

Time in a Bottle.

One of the things that I often find myself doing is that although I can understand accepting the finality of death, I'd much rather live. One song I particularly like for this is below. It was originally performed by Jim Croce, but I prefer the muppet version shown below, just for its very simple demonstration of this point.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler 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 shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked 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.

Peter Shelley.

Ozymandias is a classic poem, which beautifully sums up the view of a final ending, even for those things we think will last forever. What became of that land? None remains who know. In fact, not even the speaker of the poem can profess to have seen the remains, but instead he hears it secondhand, from a traveler.

An Oxford Elegy

But what - I dream! Two hundred years are flown
    And thou from earth art gone
Long since and in some quiet churchyard laid;
    Some country nook, where o'er thy unknown grave
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave
    Under a dark red-fruited yew-tree's shade.

Ralph Williams

An Oxford Elegy is basically a poem set to an orchestra and choir. It is a haunting work, musing on a man who has been dead for two hundred years and is now only vaguely remembered, with the reader using this to muse on his own coming death. It is melancholy, but at the end there is a note of acceptance.

The full text can be read here, and it can be listened to below. If you do get a chance to hear this performed live, I highly recommend it.

Part 1

Part 2

Forever Young.

A personally favourite of mine which I do find hard to listen to, since I associate it with a rather unpleasant time of my life, but still definitely a favourite.

Forever Young is an 80's power ballard by the group Alphaville, which has so many lines I adore I am just going to quote it fully.

Let's dance in style, lets dance for a while
Heaven can wait we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?

Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music's for the sad men

Can you imagine when this race is won
Turn our golden faces into the sun
Praising our leaders we're getting in tune
The music's played by the mad men

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever
Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever? Forever young

Some are like water, some are like the heat
Some are a melody and some are the beat
Sooner or later they all will be gone
Why don't they stay young

It's so hard to get old without a cause
I don't want to perish like a fading horse
Youth's like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever

So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams swinging out of the blue
We let them come true

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever

I may actually do a full post looking at this, but for now, here is the video.

There are also plenty of songs by the band Queen that I feel fit the theme of looking at death, but I'd quite like to do a later post just looking at them. Feel free to add any more examples in the comments.

Wandering through a Wonderfully Confusing World

07/12/2011

A small collection of links.

Ozymandias

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