Skip to main content

The Dead and Beautiful Rest: Platypus Travels Part LVIII

 If there is fear in a handful of dust, then there is truth in tombstones.  Dust and tombstones are both considered unsightly in modern America.  In California, that most cosmetic state, the Lawn Cemetery is king, with its rows of unobtrusive, ground level stones hiding the unpleasant reality of Man's mortality from all but the most curious of eyes.  But the stones are still there, and with them the truth that they tell.

When I was a child, adults always spoke to me as if certain things were my right by simple virtue of being human.  They didn't say "if you get married," they said "when."  They didn't say "if you have children," they said "when."  We were to "live our dreams" and remember that  we could "do anything we wanted" because we were "special."  To cap it all off, it was an unquestioned assumption that we'd have some seventy to eighty years to do it all in.  Tombstones tell a different story.

This is the stone of Annie J. Hinman, wife of R.N. Griffing.  She died March 15, 1875, aged twenty years.  She isn't buried under her husband's name, and I could find no trace of his grave in the cemetery.  I suspect that this is or was going to be her parents' plot.  Did she die in childbirth?  Was she a victim of Consumption?  How long was she married to R.N. Griffing?  Did he remarry?  Did he move away?  What promises were made to Annie when she was a little girl?  What did the adults tell her she could expect from life?  Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.  He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.  We do know what they said when she was gone for they wrote it on her tombstone: Let the Dead and Beautiful Rest.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...
3 comments
Read more

The Platypus and Theological Localism

My wife and I were listening the other day to Dr. Fred Sanders give a paper of California Theological Localism.  It was one of the more technical pieces we've heard from him, and it was fun to stretch our brains a little.  If I understand it right, the main idea of Theological Localism is that place matters and will shape the theology of its inhabitants in certain ways.  This could be seen as determinative, or merely as fodder for apologetic engagement, both of which Sanders rejects as insufficient or problematic.  What exactly is wanted seems to be a theological engagement with place, specifically California, in a way that Sanders and company feel has been neglected.  If that's not clear, the fault is mine as a listener or a writer. Of course, the idea of a theology of place caught my attention and my immediate response was "someone should do this for New England."  New England, after all, is its own peculiar place with, by American standards, a long, va...
6 comments
Read more