WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Time to Die: Blade Runner star Rutger Hauer dies at 75
byVanderleunonJuly 24, 2019
“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.”
We give an of course nod to the satisfying power of your testimonial to those you love and have loved, Gerard, those who have not died . . . period, but who have died . . . comma, and who await your eventual arrival in their midst, above and beyond. Thank you for sharing them with us.
Donald SensingJuly 25, 2019, 7:54 AM
I have read elsewhere that Hauer ad-libbed those lines at that moment; they were not in the screenplay.
That said, I think an equally compelling role of his was as the Soviet Army officer Alexander ‘Sasha’ Pechersky in Escape From Sobibor, the true story of the only Nazi concentration/death camp to have a mass escape. The Youtube trailer is here.
I was always impressed that at the very end, with the clock rapidly winding down to zero but time and strength enough still left, Hauer’s character could still easily have taken Deckard with him, but let him live. A fine piece of writing indeed.
SpudnikJuly 27, 2019, 8:30 AM
One of the greatest scenes ever filmed. In one of the greatest movies.
Our SciFi fan club (NESFA) all went to see that film together. When Rutger finished those lines, my wife wept.
Christopher L HuntJuly 28, 2019, 8:57 AM
My brother was in the film Past Midnight with Rutger Hauer. During filming at night, in the Northwest, my brother had to lie on the hood of a car in the background of the scene. There were so many takes that he started to shiver uncontrollably. Rutger Hauer gave him his wetsuit to wear under his costume.
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandburg
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
ARTIST: CASEY KLAHN
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
from Preludes
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
Ferreya
Song of Myself
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
from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND
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.
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Hillegas
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Gerard Van der Leun
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
The scientists are in terror
Comments on this entry are closed.
Sad day.
I’ll see your Blade Runner, and raise you one: The Mill and the Cross.
https://youtu.be/8EyqGK2blDw
May he rest in peace.
Rest in Peace.
The irony is that those words, and that performance will live on like a diamond glittering in the sun.
We give an of course nod to the satisfying power of your testimonial to those you love and have loved, Gerard, those who have not died . . . period, but who have died . . . comma, and who await your eventual arrival in their midst, above and beyond. Thank you for sharing them with us.
I have read elsewhere that Hauer ad-libbed those lines at that moment; they were not in the screenplay.
OK, here is how Hauer changed his closing lines.
That said, I think an equally compelling role of his was as the Soviet Army officer Alexander ‘Sasha’ Pechersky in Escape From Sobibor, the true story of the only Nazi concentration/death camp to have a mass escape. The Youtube trailer is here.
The movie is on Amazon Prime, but is also online at Daily Motion in excellent quality.
I was always impressed that at the very end, with the clock rapidly winding down to zero but time and strength enough still left, Hauer’s character could still easily have taken Deckard with him, but let him live. A fine piece of writing indeed.
One of the greatest scenes ever filmed. In one of the greatest movies.
Our SciFi fan club (NESFA) all went to see that film together. When Rutger finished those lines, my wife wept.
My brother was in the film Past Midnight with Rutger Hauer. During filming at night, in the Northwest, my brother had to lie on the hood of a car in the background of the scene. There were so many takes that he started to shiver uncontrollably. Rutger Hauer gave him his wetsuit to wear under his costume.