This day, last year, I commemorated the violent and - perhaps insufficiently - vitriolic end of the experiment to bargain a more open, democratic society through student protest at the Tiananmen square, with a somber and less melancholic-optimistic emphasis on the future, on two systems not so much destined as already clashing, and with the current events in the beacon of the West, we would do well to emphasise, in increasingly exhaustive contemplation, the fate of the East, their likely and our desired. But this day I would point to a fate and loss of less remembrance marked with this irredeemable date of November 9.
He was never rewarded with the Peace Price, or even that for Literature issued in Nobel's actual hometown of Stockholm (there, I got you) but his work is still vibrant and living, in this second, and often quite extensive, lifespan of a poet. He was beloved, both by kin and foes - if one could say that of the English colonial-power turned nearly a subject by the emergence of the Liberal party, the working men, of Lloyd George at the turn of the 20th century - to such extent that his person or work was hardly ever denounced and could not be denied even in the turbulent landscape in which he walked and wrote. While American fantasy writer George R. R. Martin's first seminal work, just like his efforts to bring science fiction into modernity, may never be as known as even the ever-next suite of his magnum opus, quotations from having passed into extensive and equally never-ending use, that immortalised in his very first published title (or a novel, that is) is that of a truly immortal poem by the Welshman, and while "true" Welshman Richard Burton, born Ffyon Jenkins, made sure to make note both his love of the English verse during his moment in the light at Dick Cavett's show, as to his preferences to be buried in red when that moment - prophesised, if one can call it thus - during said exchange.
Steadfastly Welsh, never an object of self-made hagiography.
He was larger than that, however. Due to his inability to accomplish financial security from his talent, he was a man of real life and labour, of which he had time to go through
The first paragraph was, only last year, immortalised to me yet again when fellow East coaster Bruce Springsteen noted he thought it would not apply to the now encumbered, then only so cumbersome, president. Well, we shall see.
Do not go easy into the Night
Rage, rage against the dying of the Light...
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