Memento Mori - 'Remember you will die'

'I died for Beauty, But was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for Truth was lain
In an adjoining room,

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For Beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are," He said.

And so, as kinsman met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

Emily Dickinson 1830 - 86

I've been looking through a book of Simon Marsden's photographs (http://www.simonmarsden.co.uk/) for inspiration recently particularly Memento Mori which I got for Christmas and on reading the preface realised that I did not need reminding that I would die but was aware of it every day and that I had spent a lot of my life being both fascinated and terrified by the prospect. And I remembered how as a kid we would rehearse death when we played 'War' and that there seemed something dramatic and noble about it then but unlike the reality we would be spring back to life on the count of ten.
Do kids still play 'War'? So many hours of my childhood was spent re enacting what we had seen in 'The Dam Busters', '633 Squadren' and 'Dunkirk'. I guess to many today such films would be seen as propagating a myth of stoic, decent Brits and their allies and evil Nazis but a myth with more honesty and truth than the relatavism of today where all are victims and good and bad are reactionary constructs and all societies equal but with some, namely ours and America, less equal than others.

Anyway, I digress!

I've decided to illustrate this topic with one of my own pictures rather than one by Simon Marsden, I took this about twenty years ago in a beautiful Victorian cemetary in Leicester one Winter's afternoon. Perhaps its just that my Mum indoctrinated me but I find places like that unbearably poignant all of that life lived and now gone never to brought back, they felt the sun on their back as do I now and one day the sun will rise and the swallows dart across the warm Summer earth as it is in my garden now but I will not be there to see and feel it. Another life gone, soon to be forgotten.

Memento Mori