Say It Like Keats…

British poet John Keats (1795-1821) was just 25 and  penniless when a lung disease ended his life. He was never married, but Fanny Brawne was the love of his life, and he expressed his love in his letters to her with words that became descriptions of love itself.

Perhaps he spoke for all men in their dreams of a first love when two years before his death, he thusly described his and Fanny’s unending love (BELOW):

“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d — see here it is —
I hold it towards you.”

When Keats died away from their family-shared country home, Fanny was so overwhelmed by the news she’d long expected, she completely withdrew from life and never recovered from the anticipated loss.

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Credit:
Photo courtesy of http://www.pixabay.com

 

Thumb Jockeys Gaining on American Rule

Did you ever stop to think about how many hundreds and thousands of letters — yea, those written-on-paper-with-ink sheets that many years ago were used as the world’s chief source of person-to-person communication — passed between people like President John Adams and…say, his cabinet and military leaders?

Of course, you haven’t!

Before the telephone, before the telegraph, before TV, people actually had desks at which they wrote letters of communication to each other. Letters were like interpersonal newspapers.

Now, the thumb jockeys will soon rule society. Their homogenized and coded messages to their audiences already zip through the air in milliseconds.

But, while in the past we had a written record of messages, we now have nothing of the sort. And if we do, those messages are easily erased, so nobody knows anything, and no one can be held accountable.

Is technology amazing, or what?

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Credit:
Photo courtesy of http://www.pixabay.com