(no subject)
"Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes."
Never have I loved you, as I love you on this day: never more for your beauty, my Queen, for your blood and your poise; for your gift of childbearing, and your Children of Death; for your eyes and your lips; for your cunning.
And never more have I hated you, for your Grove and your Fire, and your plain silence also.
Forgive me, my Queen, I am a simple creature.
You have given me ice, and it has gone to my bones.
- Marius de Romanus
"Do not pass by my epitaph, traveller.
But having stopped, listen and learn, then go your way.
There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon,
No caretaker Aiakos, no dog Cerberus.
All we who are dead below
Have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.
I have spoken to you honestly, go on, traveller,
Lest even while dead I seem loquacious to you."
It is only a tombstone with its inscription, but the feeling is there. We must not forget feeling.
We malign the Lady Death, to speak so freely of how she has often seduced us. And sometimes succeeded, and sometimes failed - but today, her virtue is in tatters. She is a reckless lover.
But we must treat her, then, with all the courtesy of a past lover: we must speak of her not with hubris, or weeping, or piety; not with hope, and not with expectation; not with anger, never with anger, and not with bitterness, for we will be reconciled soon. Death owes us nothing, and is often fleeting. But she returns.
Ah, but I do not speak for the Lady. She keeps her own voice and her own counsel.
But there should be no shame in speaking of her, and how she has crossed our paths as a stray, than there is shame in crossing a feeble bridge. We play the simple part of life as if it were a journey, and neither point, its beginning, or its end or some median is as simple, or beautiful, or great indeed as is the whole.
private :: armand
Have your device, Armand.
There is no reason to begrudge me such a simple thing, and I have found no use in it.
Think of it instead as one of the many gifts owed to you, and a kindness also, that you would help me repay such a great debt.
- Marius de Romanus