“There's enough bullshit as it is. There is just enough bullshit to hold things together in this country. Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation. Where would we be without our safe american bullshit.”

- George Carlin

Lazy

by James Weldon Johnson

Some men enjoy the constant strife

Of days with work and worry rife,

But that is not my dream of life:

I think such men are crazy.

For me, a life with worries few,

A job of nothing much to do,

Just pelf enough to see me through:

I fear that I am lazy.

On winter mornings cold and drear,

When six o'clock alarms I hear,

'Tis then I love to shift my ear,

And hug my downy pillows.

When in the shade it's ninety-three,

No job in town looks good to me,

I'd rather loaf down by the sea,

And watch the foaming billows.

Some people think the world's a school,

Where labor is the only rule;

But I'll not make myself a mule,

And don't you ever doubt it.

I know that work may have its use,

But still I feel that's no excuse

For turning it into abuse;

What do you think about it?

Let others fume and sweat and boil,

And scratch and dig for golden spoil,

And live the life of work and toil,

Their lives to labor giving.

But what is gold when life is sped,

And life is short, as has been said,

And we are such a long time dead,

I'll spend my life in living.

Lord Byron, Age of Bronze (1823)

“His name a doubt to all the winds of heaven;

The reed of Fortune, and of thrones the rod,

Of Fame the Moloch or the demigod;

His country's Caesar, Europe's Hannibal,

Without their decent dignity of fall.

Yet Vanity herself had better taught

A surer path even to the fame he sought,

By pointing out on history's fruitless page

Ten thousand conquerors for a single sage.

While Franklin's quiet memory climbs to heaven,

Calming the lightning which he thence hath riven,

Or drawing from the no less kindled earth

Freedom and peace to that which boasts his birth;

While Washington's a watchword, such as ne'er

Shall sink while there's an echo left to air”

Howard Phillips Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937.

Copied below is the obituary that originally ran on March 16, 1937 in Providence, RI.

“Funeral services for Howard Phillip Lovecraft, student and writer of fiction, who died yesterday at Jane Brown Memorial Hospital, will be held Thursday at 12 o’clock in the chapel of Horace B. Knowles’s Sons, 187 Benefit Street. Burial will be in the family plot in Swan Point Cemetery. He was 46.

Born in this city, Aug. 20, 1890, the only child of the late Winfield S. and Sarah P. Lovecraft, Mr. Lovecraft from early life was handicapped by poor health. Essentially a student and an omnivorous reader, he was able to take his place only from time to time in regular school classrooms with children of his own age but graduated from Hope Street high school and secured the equivalent of a college education from private tutors.

His early recourse to the library of his grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips, at 454 Angell street in which he was turned loose to browse at will gave him the bend toward weird writing which was his hobby. In his autobiographs, which he wrote up to the day before he was admitted to the hospital last month, he related the importance to his life of the fairy tales and classical tales he read but six years of age.

Besides his interest in the supernatural, he was a constant student of genealogy and of astronomy, and at one time, wrote a newspaper column on the latter subject. His days and nights for years were spent in writing in the library at 66 and College Street, where he lived, in recent years, with his aunt, Mrs. Phillips Camwell, his sole survivor. As he neared the end of his life, he turned his scholarly interests to a study of his own physical condition and daily wrote minutely of his case for his physician’s assistance. His clinical notes ended only when he could no longer hold a pencil.”

Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln

November 19, 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Source: The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, volume 7 (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), 22-23.

Norman Rockwell painting of Abraham Lincoln gettysburg address

Happy Birthday Mr. President

Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

“Alone”

By Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been As others were; I have not seen As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring. From the same source I have not taken My sorrow; I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone; And all I loved, I loved alone. Then- in my childhood, in the dawn Of a most stormy life- was drawn From every depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still: From the torrent, or the fountain, From the red cliff of the mountain, From the sun that round me rolled In its autumn tint of gold,

From the lightning in the sky

As it passed me flying by,

From the thunder and the storm, And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.

"Honesty: the best of all the lost arts." - Mark Twain

Notebook, 1902