On Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:05:30 -0800, Reginald H Pitts
<blanketghs@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>http://www.thisishamp****re.net/display.var.1816770.0.titanic_survivor...
>
>One of the two last survivors of the 1912 sinking of the ill-fated
>Southampton liner, Titanic, has died.
>
>Throughout her life, Barbara West Dainton shunned publicity, refusing
>to talk about the loss of the Titanic and in the end she insisted her
>funeral, held earlier this week in Truro, was to take place before any
>public announcement of her death.
>
>With her death in Cornwall aged 96 the only remaining Titanic
>passenger left alive is 95-year-old Milvina Dean who lives in
>Woodlands, near Southampton.
>
>Born in Bournemouth, Dorset, Mrs West Dainton was a second-class
>passenger on Titanic with her father, mother and sister, Constance.
>She survived the sinking possibly aboard lifeboat ten, along with her
>mother and sister and went on to marry in 1952.
>
>Milvina Dean was just a ten week old baby when the ****p hit the
>iceberg and was the youngest person to live to tell the tale of the
>loss of Titanic.
>
It seems appropriate to post this, alas again.
The Witness
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a stable that stands almost within the shadow of the new stone
church a gray-eyed, gray-bearded man, stretched out amid the odor of
the animals, humbly seeks death as one seeks for sleep. The day,
faithful to vast secret laws, little by little ****fts and mingles the
shadows in the humble nook. Outside are the plowed fields and a deep
ditch clogged with dead leaves and an occasional wolf track in the
black earth at the edge of the forest. The man sleeps and dreams,
forgotten. The angelus awakens him. By now the sound of the bells is
one of the habits of evening in the kingdoms of England. But this man,
as a child, saw the face of Woden, the holy dread and exultation, the
rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments,
the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will die,
and in him will die, never to return, the last eye-witness of those
pagan rites; the world will be a little poorer when this Saxon dies.
Events far-reaching enough to people all space, whose end is
nonetheless tolled when one man dies, may cause us wonder. But
something. or an infinite number of things, dies in every death,
unless the universe is possessed of a memory, as the theosophists have
supposed.
In the course of time there was a day that closed the last eyes to see
Christ. The battle of Junin and the love of Helen each died with the
death of some one man. What will die with me when I die, what pitiful
or perishable form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio
Fernandez? The image of a roan horse on the vacant lot at Serrano and
Charcas? A bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
Regards
Doug Urquhart
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