umbrella duel: it’s all equally a matter of getting everything at the right place for the time as much as being on time for the place where you are
un … able: to me … are you; talking to me; *looking over one shoulder, looking over the other*; I don’t see anyone else around; are; you talking; to me …?
uncompletely: between zero and one; between emptiness and existence, between the yin and the yang, between the blank page and the poem, between the posture and the awareness … are whole lifetimes of endeavour
… the underleaves show: Blists Hill is a delightfully recreated Victorian industrial town near Ironbridge, Shropshire which tags itself ‘The Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ we revisited in May 2017; the cut in the middle is the nominal elapse of centuries
underneath: the difference of world between doing and being
under silent direction of architecture: askance from chapter seven of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
under the blue and blue sky: who is it, who is it: that noticed or wrote or snapped or talked or stopped or dressed or read …?
‘under the orange streetlamp the…’: a waste groundal
update: “Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” ― Chuang-Tzu, 4th C. BCE
unspectacularly / unexpectantly / undulatingly: theerrrrrrrrrrrr … wheels on the bus go round and round …
until: the eternal wait of childhood in everything when everything is already all around
‘up floated the printed words …’: the first experience, after learning to read, that reading is more than just following the words
up here: plucked in passing overhead from the pages of Spider-Man #90-113 (November 1970 – October 1972), written by Stan Lee & Roy Thomas; drawn by Gil Kane and John Romita
uphill: the effort to get uphill
the utter beauty of giving when receiving: written when I was 54, published when I was 55, realised …
up on the hill: ‘up on the hill’ is not the same ‘up on the hill’ which is the start of Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’, but it starts from a similar call; the ‘hill’ is Shooters Hill which rucks up in the south east London basin just short of the Thames; the ‘bench’ is one of a few on a piece of land at the corner of Nithdale Road and Plum lane overlooking Plumcroft school, the lower slopes of Plumstead and the sprawl of the developing Woolwich Arsenal estate to the Thames as you raise your gaze from the ground, eveningly; this is a small, open patch of land which doesn’t obviously seem to belong to anyone, but is important to any awkward teenager who may wonder if their way is in writing …
vagued: I went up to the mountaintop … and went back down again, way too windy, way too heroic, I couldn’t trust myself up there, I couldn’t find myself up there; so I sat in a dusty bare-floorboard room and looked for the promised land, breathing …
… vague / thunder: the bus on the wheels go round and round …
Vajrapani: imagine the city and the bough in white silhouette and blue flames of wisdom in the space between
Valentine’s Day 2019: love is so simple
vastly: different than ever expected
varnish: gnarlyspeak
venetian blinds: there is so high to see through a venetian blind
the / very gradual art of sitting: to write without sheath, to breathe without effort
the very gradual / practice of sitting: tv was not just something that we watched, it was something which programmed our waves
the VERY THINGS: … what EVEN …?
Victorian bays / right angles and eaves: tears and wonder in stone and brick
Victorian / houses / uphill / Brighton: a modern Brueghel
Victorian pipework: the outer-belly of life behind which to turn the blind-eye
Virginia: I understand this much: that Virginia Woolf was nurtured in, but wanted to bridge out from, the more of [patriarchal] social imperialism; it has waited this long for me to appreciate her need and courage whilst emerging from the more of unattributable results/problem-solving-backwards managerialism in what should be public (not political, not (someone’s) personal (career)) service (not done-deal) into retirement, in an era when it all seems to be lurching horribly right again
vision: the border between growing child and living teen
vision-seeing-being: everything and beingness
volcanic rock: is it the hills or the trees what do the sipping …
Vue de Pontoise, 1873: approaching and leaving Vue de Pontoise, 1873 by Camille Pissarro
waiting: “well, it’s been so long … and I’ve been putting out fire, with gasoline”
waiting: ‘… I’m a British subject andnot proud of it / ‘swhy I carry the Burden of Shame’ – read the poem, listen to the song by UB40
waiting room: the more you wait for an appointed hour, the more you realise that everything else doesn’t wait at all, and that this is what makes things happen (reminds me of an old hippy anti-war slogan: ‘imagine that someone threw a war and nobody turned up’)
waiting to be heard: the nakedness of holiday, all round
wakey wakey / time to get up: always the eight year old trying to bridge the forty four year gap with himself and every year finding himself another year behind
wakeoutofadream: not sure if I was a teacher dreaming of life or a life dreaming of what it could be like
walk from Castleton to Hope: it’s in the rising hills
walking: and when I was young I used to walk along those walls – I can’t remember if I held my Mum’s hand or not
walking: one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two one two …
“walking …”: a blue-steel clean blue-evening sky New Year 2016 to you all
… walking down the street: Dionne Warwick, ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ (1962) & ‘Walk on By’ (1964) by Bacharach & David
walking over / Shooters Hill: walking across the top of the city, knowing where I am going
walking / right into the side of the very door left / open for me: I was publishing my way through misfits’ miscellany one day, as you do, and young Phil drops a comment that has me gurning and gawking for awhile until I pulled myself together from the splitting headache that had suddenly developed … still this was all a long time ago
walking through Lewes: birth canal
‘walking up Whitehill Road …’: … and I forgot to mention, up the middle of the road as well
walk / in the fog: a prescient see-through
‘the walking stick …’: some days I just don’t want to go to work …
‘a walk up the path …’:: a grand-uncle’s green paint, rickety door to chicken coop, and dove cot garden experience before I knew what any of these things were only now they have all disappeared into history
waltz: borne from a piece of advice from AJ as she stood in the treacle calling to me standing in the same treacle
wanting to be loved: mirroring Joni Mitchell’s refrain ‘will you take me as I am’ from California
the warp and the plumbing: … the weft and the pipe
warp and weft: my life in the 19th 20th and 21st centuries all crammed into every single day and sometimes every single hour
washing lines and trees: the moment when storms switch … everything
washing up: some moments can be so clean if you are paying attention
was there a moon / on the alleyway wall / confused in front of / the city skyline?: I knew there was a poem somewhere in 2014 which I hadn’t posted yet but it was so difficult to find through all those pockets within pockets
wasted –: sometimes it goes like that, sometimes it goes
watching / the mind / breathing: seeing is breathing
the way: I Have therefore am Compromised
weddin’: ‘weyl issnot evvree day yoo ge’h mariddiszit?’, ‘na’oh, noh’; yerr-rih’ their’
weekend: byau byau park life
well,: even when it all comes together, it is always beside the way that makes it
we held cold hands: on our first ‘date’ together we walked after dark along Morecambe front with the breeze of the North Atlantic in our right ears; it wasn’t until later that Carol said it was so fresh that a dew-drop of snot hung from my nose and then blew off onto her coat and she quietly rubbed it in, this was even before we held hands … the Last Day of Morecambe Illuminations
weight: when you slip out of a career and look back on what was achieved, there is only a quiet and drifting cloud to contemplate although the experience of working through it was of unworkable stone which you knew all the time shouldn’t be the case, but it was, it was;
weight of high sash windows – poewieview #33: mlred in the dry quick of sandQuicksand, 1971
‘went up to London and what did I see; …’: written with the train tickets I found amongst the scattered Do Anything You Say, 1966; Good Morning Girl, 1966; I Dig Everything, 1966; I’m Not Losing Sleep, 1966
we play a game: the eternal questioning of ourself which drives the biography of our life
we play / the game: still
we’re all the same age really: We passed upon the stair / We spoke of was and when / Although I wasn’t there / He said I was his friend / Which came as some surprise / I spoke into his eyes / “I thought you died alone / A long long time ago.” // “Oh no, not me, / I never lost control / You’re face to face / With the man who sold the world.” // I laughed and shook his hand / And made my way back home / I searched for form and land / For years and years I roamed. / I gazed a gazley stare / At all the millions here: / “We must have died alone / A long long time ago.” (David Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World)
we’re born // to die: keeping chasing is so exhausting
Western Motel, 1957: an over-the-shoulder by Edward Hopper
we still stroll there: antumbral hauntings
we // walk: the suffocating weight of choice and option, taken casually in a stride
wha’: with no mind the things that need to be done are done already while the mind wonders how it can be possible to act
`whappn’d!: on 25th August 1981, Carol and Mark got married in a registry office – in, signed, out within 15 minutes; 37 years later found them in their local garden shop cafe on Ashdown Forest looking at each other across the table … he had been like a stone giving little that was needed, she was like a sponge taking all that was available and still dry …
what?: it’s like teaching schoolkids, sometimes: no matter how much or clearly or inclusively you explain, they always start with a question that begins, ‘what, …?’; YES, yes, that’s exactly what I just said! Shall I mime it for you? ‘What, you mean act it out?’ NOOOOOOOooooooh, yes, yes, that is exactly what I meant … ‘then, why didn’t you say so?’ Gurn!
what …: this is what happens when you take Allen Ginsberg on holiday with you
what comes first … // the poem or the content … // the shamatha or the vipashyana … // the posture … // or the sitting?: this piece was about 4 hours old when it was published
‘‘whatdoyouwantmylove…’ on the train …’: the ubiquitous anxiety of choice
what heavy and cantilevered structure: askance from chapter fourteen & the epilogue of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
what I am about to say is true / what I just said was a lie: the idiocy of iniquity
what I am about to say is true / what I just said was a lie: I have just got off the phone to an Occupational Health worker trying to explain for the for the g’zillionth time why I cannot function with any sense of worth in an education which is value-bled
what life went on: dream of the childhood home; I was in the front living room where I heard my parents argue for the first and last time; now my mother is dead and my Dad lives a whole lifetime away in Cambridgeshire
what to do: in a dream where you cannot quite pick up objects and you cannot hear yourself speak …
what wounds have you got?: since this was written and published years ago I have subsequently and finally retired … from being the ‘ghost with open wound‘; I am now, just cold; I suppose ghosts die, but what about those ghosts who were alive while they were ghosts, what happens to them: maybe they haunt their own reincarnation …
when: propinquity
when anythinging: it’s all in the abdomen; more abdomen yoga
when in Belgium do as the chocolates do: the author has been told repeatedly that he has high cholesterol – he has to watch his intake; he doesn’t wholly believe it (another instance of old Grand Daddy Science finding something else it can count, and froth-at-the-mouth Pharmaceutical Industry seeing yet another market opportunity to create); Carol is his wife of 34 years whom he has grown to love better each year since he learned to stop taking himself so seriously (… funny, that!); they had a short holiday in Ghent in 2013.
when / ever: “in caverns measureless to man … down to a sunless sea …” – answers on a postcard please …
when I sit I am the posture: breathing in breathing out breathing
‘when it came / time to go …’: arriving, staying and departing are each as evanescent as the next breath
‘when sitting I am just sitting maybe …’: a song of ever-widening opening that converges to a point
‘when sitting just sit …’: I have absolutely nothing to say about this poem
when the rain has settled / the dust: 6*; written on holiday in Lanzarote, an island made of volcanoes, January 2018; continuing to study the Bodhisattvacharyavatara with, this time, a Spanish translation, hoping to soak into the language I know not so well with the text that is becoming familiar; I arrived at chapter VI, verse 10: “¿Por qué sentirse infeliz por algo que puede remediarse? y ¿de que sirve sentirse desgraciado por algo que no tiene remedio?” (Destellos de Sabiduria, trans. Isidro Gordi, 1995); hoping also that some sun in January will help kick start the posture of writing, which sat slumped and without abdomen in 2017; lucky, too, that the weather broke during our week making olive clouds of rain; being on holiday involves consciously setting up a routine of living in a new space and a new time, which is refreshing, retunes the senses to attend clearly; and days and events and pieces of writing, especially good ones, don’t happen again just because I’d like them to – that is self-suffocating, that you need to have the courage to let open the doors and windows even in winter
when things fall apart: written during my first breakdown from school but – very fortuitously – at the same time I was discovering the books of Pema Chödrön which were teaching such beauty that when you fall to the ground you use that very same ground to push yourself back upright again; the adversity faced in life is the very same point with which you start working the solution
‘when travelling astrally …’: from Strange Tales #121, ‘Witchcraft in the Wax Museum’, June 1964; Lee & Ditko
when writing // stay: ”Cause you can never really tell / When somebody wants something you, want, too,’
where did the silence go: not a question, so much, as breathing
where else: a third encounter of the close kind
where is there a Middle Way when you want one … / … / … oh!?: what to do, where to go; to be or not to be; to give or to hoard; to be outstanding or sincere; what do you think, well I don’t know; what if, if but; shall I, should I; a true state of both the ‘dileminal’ and the solution staring you straight in the face
where it has taken birth / may it not decrease …: right-angled out of chapter IV of Shantideva’s Bodhisattvacharyavatara … or in
where the goblins leered – poewieview #14: grown through hedge of Letter to Hermione, 1969 and brow of An Occasional Dream, 1969
where the real action // always is: … behind closed eyes
where to find it: … when it’s all about and everywhere anyway?
whey: left after yogurt has cultured; you have to wait for it to do its thing
which is worse: the professional catch-22 which I suspect that everyone is facing …
while: -ing away the time until there is no gap
while: retirement #5: written, of course, before I retired, but only now does the significance break through the clouds and the smokey grey perspex roof
while: stretched out over 33 years
while / walking: stop
while walking: this waited around without its proper shape until I just slightly adjusted it and realised it was really an old persimmon
whirlpool: don’t mind the big stuff, and when everything is a whirlpool anyway – near or far, as it is – everything is small stuff anyway
‘white blossom …’: settle and tension …
whiter than family: … doesn’t matter what it says on the label
who: who is ‘you’? If you have to ask, it probably isn’t you; if you don’t have to ask, you know it’s you and you should feel all the shame of your profession
“WHOOOOOOOOOP!!!”: I don’t know what this is all about at all but I’ve fondly kept hold of it nevertheless
wide-open / concentration: detachment allows the cleanest of intimacy
wider resolve: not throwing the baby out with the bathwater unless I am very much mistaken
William Carlos Williams: a hospital
Winchester: look at me look at me
Winchester Cathedral: the House, all parts pointing to God
the windmill: a pucker
window: the eternal child of the eye
window: all the even of want can never push through the transparent barrier that was never forever there between what is seen through it and the desire that it evokes
window: the sounds of light downloaded from Petworth: the Artist and his Admirers (the old library), c. 1830 by William Turner; when light enters through windows it turns to music if there is an alert-enough artist to express it and an audience-enough to hear
the window: …the most psychological of human inventions; the window frames the internal experience of the outside world; when aware of this, the window becomes the field through which to explore our experience
window open: the fulcrum of worlds
window open: hanging onto the self to the very last breath; time and time again
windows // and balconies: there, all along the high street, above the shopfronts
winter / weeks: this teaches me that you need to pay attention to your relationships
with all love released: After attaining Enlightenment at Bodh Gaya the Buddha walked to Sarnath; it was here that he preached his first discourse in the deer park to his former co-practitioners of asceticism.
‘with delight …’: a passing mirroring image
with endless love: “Let it grow, let it grow, / Let it blossom, let it flow …” (Eric Clapton)
within: the development of staying where you are and resisting turning around at every other tree and saying, “come, on”
within: the allay of summer afternoons
without any buffet at all: the thing about depression is that you don’t know you’ve got it until something has gone obviously wrong; and even then it usually needs to be pointed out to you; and, even then, you need to be in a position to be open to hearing that something is going wrong, which can be very difficult if any amount of what is going wrong is bound up with your self-identity or sense of self-worth; or it creeps into you, like damp; in the Twelve Links of Interdependent Origination 1. ignorance of the-way-things-is[sic] produces 2. a consciousness which is preter-naturally dualistic, which performs 3. dualistic actions within a dualistically-perceived universe of cause and effect, which over time congeals 4. a stronger sense of self and form which strengthen reference of the dualistic universe with 5. developing senses, which strengthens the sense of 6. ‘contact’ with ‘other’ in the dualistic universe, which produces 7. feelings of attraction of aversion or indifference according to what “I” want/don’t want, which produces 8. craving for what I think “I” want, which develops into 9. attachment to that which I think refines my sense of self (… designer-self), which means I 10. become what “I” think “I” am and I’ll continue to become 11. born reflected back and imprisoned by the detriment of my prior insistence until I 12. get sick and tired of it and retreat back into a figurative and bitter womb of, 1. ignorance of the way things are …; micro, macro, they’re much the same thing, even in a dualistic universe; the beauty about the teaching, however, is that you take one link out (like a domino) and the follow-ons … don’t – just a matter of at which point it is easier to disengage …
woman / has worked in the gym / got a build: the delicate art of strength
Woodbrooke labyrinth / affirmations: round and round the garden, like a teddy bear, one step, two steps and a …
Woolwich: looking for anything colourful in a dark town
Woolwich Central – / making life better: building – the propinquity of space and time
Woolwich Central – / making life better II: may all sentient beings have happiness and the cause of happiness may all sentient beings be separated from suffering and the cause of suffering may all sentient beings never be separated from the happiness that knows no suffering may all sentient beings abide in equanimity free from feeling both near or far or attachment or aversion
Woolwich Central – making life better II: I go for refuge until I am fully enlightened to the Guru the Buddha the Dharma and the Sangha; through the virtuous merit that I collect by practising giving and other Perfections, may I become a fully enlightened Buddha in order to benefit all migrating beings
Woolwich re-generation: look at the difference a hyphen makes …
the / Woolworth / Building: dy’know, I was gliding over the buildings and architecture of the city the other evening and it suddenly occurred to me …
words: what came first, the word, the what or the number …?
words tumble like / boulders – poewieview #25: settled throughout: Holy Holy, 1971; Oh! You Pretty Things, 1971; Fill Your Heart, 1971; How Lucky You Are (Miss Peculiar), 1971; Hang On To Yourself, 1971, after the dust
work: my ‘grandmother’ was Gladys Charlotte Conlay who lived a life of work for all her families, without guile or motive, between 1906 and 1989; the garden was in ‘Genesta Road’ – her last home which she made with her divorced daughter and her two grandsons
work: worked five long years at the mill, shuckin’ steel like a slave …
working / for a living: it’s so simple
‘work with exciting / new minds …’: was a slogan used in tv adverts trying to recruit people to a career in teaching; actually pupils’ minds can be exciting and new when you let them but they have to thrive in a system which doesn’t recognise the dialectic that could allow them; let alone teachers to midwife the dialectic
‘the worm …’: Suzuki Roshi once said to a returning student that you can never get lost
worthwhile: if only I could remember it amid the fluffulensce of the world – it is so simple and so obvious as to be one of life’s remaining mysteries
woven-through: just a quick one before settling down to sleep
wraggle of architecture: the structure of immanence
write / in / g: Ok, pen set, I’m going in – tell my wife and kids, I did it for them
write / by the / night / of the / lamp: written
“write, let’s break / outta here!”: teeth-clenched determination to damn-well let go
“write, let’s break outta here!”: Sgt. Scrawl and the Howlin’ Commandos!
writening: the penultimate of my 2018 pieces of work … and they’ve not been coming thick and fast during 2019 either … well’s drying up!
writing: on how writing – when you hit it right – is not an extra activity, not a skill to be perfected, but a natural function of experience; as breathing is to living, as stepping is to walking
writing: it is true that the zen that can be written is not true zen
‘writing again by …’: a sister to ‘typewriting by the …’
writing as zazen: the travelling of writing going nowhere and learning everything
‘writing creatively …’: the sitting of travel the travel of sitting
writing: // in turn: Bodhisattvacharyavatara chapter I, verse 3; IF we are reborn, for each rebirth we would need a mother to give that birth to us and to bring us up; if we have had former rebirths without beginning, we have had infinite mothers – good, bad and indifferent; were ARE all these former mothers now …?; and what has this to do with writing (or any other creative endeavour)?
writing is not a container of reality / it is being the reality / itself: it’s like the first note of the guitar solo is crucial, if you hit that right the rest is frills … if you know how to play a guitar
the writing’s / on the wall: always trying to escape, never resting
the writing’s on the wall: … rather than a banged head
a written life: I think I am finding that my writing is my autobiography without me fully realising or intending it (what else could it be about?). More, I find that my writing creates my life; not ex nihilo – that would be impossibly omnipotent – but that it is a re-breathing (contemporary and historical, objective and subjective) that makes life come to life (the appearence of some reds, some odd yellows, some draped greens in ‘Pleasantville‘). My writing anchors in the outer world but I am realising (like dry rot) that the outer world is the mind – my mind. So writing is the outer world in my mind – my outer world. But then when you read my writing (and thank you for doing so – even if you don’t like it you still had to react to reading it) an alchemy will take place: my (outer) world and your (inner) reading will recognise each other, maybe shake hands, they might even hold a conversation. So my writing is everything that is: in and about me and me in my world and your life. Which sounds a bit creepy and needy, but it is not you personally so much as you wholly: me in my world (sounding more and more tautological) informing you and your world like Venn diagrams – like the universe expanding. The collection of my writing is like a huge, messy mandala. Mandalas are maps of the world of the mind with which to find the center. In reflecting on the mind with my world I am wanderingly finding my way to a centre which ever widens and expands as I get near to it. I am finding that the center is the journey to the circumference. I am reminded of what Einstein is reported to have said, that if you could see infinitely in a straight line you would see the back of your own head. I would quip that if you could read infinitely (not everything) you would think your own thoughts. And in thinking your own thoughts you would find your own mind. But in finding your own mind you would also find that it isn’t just yours. As you had thought. Hey ho.
written relief to / creeping anaesthesia / through palimpsest / and crankled page: the difference between moving and staying put
wriving: … to be or not to be, that is the predicate
wriving: being: what to do in life while living it; doing: what to be in life while wondering; career: what to eat in life while digesting it
wrong: in the great tradition of Ginsberg being so candid that it is slightly excruciating, but so open that it is spacious
‘the wrong door …’: oh, I’m sorry, excuse me …
yellow and blue: words as colour, colour as words
yes: this poem has a companion piece – ‘Batman …’
Yes No: oh for goodness’ sake
yet another sprain / of ‘Jingle Bells’ straining / to propagate yet another / tired Christmas spirit – … / ‘sanner clawsis coming t’ taunn – yeah’ in a / coffee shop with condensation / running off the snowflake transfers / and the iphone at the next table / talking how 50 means 900 a month – not worth / the drive (left his scarf behind – / collateral) … about my age: ‘sanner clawsis coming t’ taunn – yeah’; the unrelenting perpetuity of the myth of spending as natural as wasted breath by which we define ourselves Had from birth …
you: the right time to publish this was when discovering David Bowie’s ‘Something in the Air’
you: muzak
you are in uniform: a cubist portrait with but a single plane
you are not a manager: yes, YES, this IS angry
you can only smell the candles / when they have been snuffed out: third part of the triptych scenes ’round a wedding: // you can only smell the candles / when they have been snuffed out
you don’t talk to me: so many words are put to strain at school, millions of them like little platelets coursing through the system, and so little communication achieved – or even sought
you fail: the skill of keeping things interesting
‘young trees all the same height …’: a flat
you’re gonna lose that girl: an audial
your gold teeth: Steely Dan, from the Countdown to Ecstasy album (1973)
‘youth appeared …’: as a placard said in the TUC march against cuts in London in 2011: ‘my life / is not / your / market’
zagged: oh won’t someone look after this eight year old boy – I’m sorry, get a grip, Redford
zazen: don’t listen to me, I haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about
zazen: I think I see what I mean here
zazen: ‘if you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise …’
zazen in everyday life: blink and you … blink
zen against / the window: published in the midst of rupturing spectacularly from my career which has been a gruelling 70º turn in the direction I wanted to travel, but not in the way I wanted to travel
zero: the symptoms the diagnosis the prognosis and the cure are all the same thing
zero: the wisdom never heard nor practised but always sufficient unto itself; in retrospect
zok! and pow!: emerging to relationship during the 1960s
…zzh-vvttP*–… … …: Bodhisattvacharyavatara Chapter VI, verses 57-59: [57] Consider: a person sleeps and dreams of encountering happiness after happiness for a hundred years wherever they go; and another has a dream in which they experience pervasive happiness for just an instant. [58] Surely once they have woken from their dreams, their happiness will also just disappear for them both. Similarly, everything is lost, whether life was long or short, when the time of death arrives. [59] Likewise too, having long savoured all of my many, stored-up pleasures and acquisitions, having enjoyed my long life to the full, at the time of death, just like that, I shall nevertheless have to leave this life as though I had been stripped bare and broken by thugs, left to go forth with empty hands and naked.
mlewisredford 