Anthony

“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire, I
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Qut of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children. I would have them keep their dis-
tance from the thickening center; corruption.
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster’s feet there are left the mountajns.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
-–they say--God, when he walked on earth.”
― Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems

“... as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”
― Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I

“The temple is holy because it is not for sale.”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos