Stories of the Gone World
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
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Great story. Thanks for one more wonderful, Gerard.
Excellent!
Nice story. A reveal that Moore is/was a classy gent.
Are there any celebrity types that would do that kind of thing today?
They all seem so full themselves.
A classic English gentleman. Sir Roger played Bond with a more humorous tone than the others;I suspect it came quite naturally to him.
What a lovely story,thanks Mr V.
Another one to file under They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To.
By the time Moore took on the Bond role the appeal of Bond films had begun to pale for me, but I shall always love his work in The Saint TV series, which I enjoyed as a teen, perhaps in some measure because it aired late, after prime time, and I was the only one of my family still awake so that I felt quite grown-up to watch the program with the lights out and only the shifting glow of the TV tube to cast the living room into a chiaroscuro that seemed to deepen each episode’s appeal.
It wasn’t just Moore’s portrayal of Simon Templar that entertained, it was also the series’ variety of character actors who came and went, sometimes more than twice in different roles, during the series’ run that I found delightful – and not always because they were all good at their craft, but because some of them were so awful that they contributed unintentioned amusement, such as English actors putting on thick Italian, Spanish, or Greek accents, and the thoroughly English Percy Herbert doing his level best to make me believe he was a New York City mob tough guy. The series for me is a gift that keeps on giving as, from time to time, I now have lots of fun reading on IMDb the biographies of its character players.
G: what a delightful story—why we keep coming back, every day.
Sir Roger Moore caught my attention first as Ivanhoe. He was young then and, as always, a beautiful man. He had, as always, the twinkle in his eye as Ivanhoe, Simon Templar and James Bond.
This is a great story to tell and to hold.
My mother was one of his greatest fans.
All the actors made their own impression on the James Bond character and Roger Moor made James Bond very much a continuation of his earlier ‘The Saint’ series. You can watch the series just to see all the Saint extras and co-stars who would play other and similar roles in James Bond movies later. My favorite is the Saint episode “Luella” from 1964. Roger Moore stars with David Hedison – who would play Felix Leiter in Roger Moore’s first James Bond outing “Live and Let Die” (1973). Even back in 1964, the writers inserted a story line where the Saint pretends to be James Bond to get some information out of a recalcitrant matron – almost a decade before he actually becomes James Bond. Fourth wall stuff even back then.