Always alive

Charles 2 Comments

06 October 2014

“I met the poet James Turner in my twenties: no one reads him now, yet to me he is always alive … You too must have people like that in your lives, people who are not alive in the physical sense, but remain alive in some spiritual way, which you retain in your head, in your whole personality.”

Category: Attitudes to death , memorialisation

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gloria mundi

9 years ago

Absolutely yes. Parents and sibs, of course, but also people who’ve made a big influence on me. It seems to me that we are not things, single entities, but pluralities, full of the voices and gestures of people we have known, the places we have lived, and then some. We are unfolding processes, and our present moment, our “now,” is arrived at from “them” and “then” and “there.”

Vale

9 years ago

So right, GM. All of the above. Beautifully expressed too.

For myself I’d add characters from literature and even phrases and verses from poems. Looking back, their passions and perspectives have lived in me, influencing my view of the world and choices I’ve made as much as any ‘real’ person.