Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Pray for Edwarda. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (877)	6/19/2000 4:57:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576

No! I don't believe this! Just logged on to get what I expected would be some encouraging news. Instead, I read: "Our dear friend Edwards has just passed away." Such things are not supposed to happen. I can't help being reminded of the sudden illness and death of my first husband. He was only 39. This latest sudden death of a friend in the prime of life reignites old grief.. In fond memory of Edwarda, let me quote a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (Stephen Spender translation). As can be seen from it, Rilke assigns a special role to the " early departed" (die Fruheentrucken). ......But hark to the suspiration, the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence. Rustling towards you now from these youthfully-dead. Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples were you not always being quietly addressed by their fate? Or else an inscription sublimely imposed itself on you, as, lately, the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa. What they require of me? I must gently remove the appearance of suffered injustice, that hinders a little, at times, their purely-proceeding spirits. True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to use no longer customs scarcely acquired, not to interpret roses, and other things that promise so much, in terms of a human future; to be no longer all that one used to be in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside even one's proper name like a broken toy. Strange, not to go on wishing one's wishes. Strange, to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering, hither and thither in space. And it's hard, being dead, and full of retrieving before one begins to espy a trace of eternity.--Yes, but all of the living make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions. Angels, they say, are often unable to tell whether they move among the living or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all the ages through either realm for ever, and sounds above their voices in both. They've finally no more need of us, the early-departed, one's gently weaned from terrestrial things as one mildly outgrows the breasts of a mother. But we, that have need of such mighty secrets, we, for whom sorrow's so often source of blessedest progress, could we exist without them? Is the story in vain, how once, in the mourning for Linos, venturing earliest music pierced barren numbness,and how, in the horrified space an almost deified youth suddenly quitted for ever, emptiness first felt the vibration that now charms us and comforts and helps?