To grieve is also to praise.

“(G)rief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.”

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost… It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again.”

- Philip K. Dick from Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Lewis Payne, after his arrest: 1865. Payne was one of the four men hanged for the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspiracy.

The four-man assassination conspiracy was orchestrated by John Wilkes Booth. In April of 1865 it was decided the roles that each would play in the grand scheme: Payne was to go to the home of Secretary of State William Seward and kill him, accompanied by Herold. Atzerodt would assassinate Vice President Johnson, and Booth was to kill Abraham Lincoln.

After being escorted to the Seward residence by David Herold, Payne attempted to kill William Seward on April 14, 1865 by breaking into his bedroom and stabbing him repeatedly. This is the same night that John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.

However, earlier in the month, on April 5, 1865, Secretary of State Seward had been injured in a carriage accident, and suffered a concussion, a broken jaw, a broken right arm, and many serious bruises. A jaw splint worn by Seward helped to save his life by deflecting the knife away from his jugular vein. Four other people were injured in the attack. Another member of the conspiracy, George Atzerodt, failed to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson, because he lost his nerve and got drunk.

(John Wilkes Booth was tracked down and killed by Union soldiers twelve days later at a farm in rural northern Virginia)

Payne was executed with three other conspirators on July 7, 1865. He went to the gallows calmly and quietly, though at some point he was believed to have pleaded for the life of Mary Surratt shortly before he was hanged.

While hangman Christian Rath was placing the noose over young Payne’s head he remarked, “I hope you die quick.” He had been impressed by Payne’s courage and determination in the face of death. To this Payne replied, “You know best, captain.” However Payne did not die quickly as hoped by Rath. After the drop he struggled for life more than five minutes. His body swinging wildly, twice he “Moved his legs up into the sitting position” and was the last to die. (Wikipedia)

The execution of Mary Surratt, Lewis Payne, David Herold and George Atzerodt on July 7, 1865.

We live in a culture that continues to find new ways to display ever more intimate, and mundane, details of domestic life. In a YouTube world, one’s home is no longer one’s private retreat: it’s just a container for the webcam.

Now, two designers are working out a dialogue between voyeurism and exhibitionism, when they designed the swooping, shiny white interiors of the W Downtown, a glass-walled condominium tower to be built in 2009 in Manhattan’s financial district.

Not only will the building’s glass walls allow W residents to see, and be seen by, passers-by on the street below, but Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo have created peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that’s a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too. The idea, Mr. Fletcher said, was to frame and exhibit the intimate details of life, or at least ones that would be aesthetically pleasing, “like your silhouette in the shower.”

Read the complete article here: Yours for the Peeping

Is it reasonable to ask of men and women, to be monogamous? Is a sexless marriage normal?

Philip Weiss explores this notion in his NY Magazine article: The Affairs of Men.

“I haven’t ever seen anyone who doesn’t deliver on every single demand their sexuality makes on them. We make the mistake of thinking some people have a stronger will, they don’t.”

Read Weiss’ article here: The Affairs of Men: The trouble with sex and marriage

…Part I of a synopsis of one of the most misunderstood yet supremely monumental Western thinkers that changed my life: Friedrich Nietzsche…

“If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

- Samuel Adams

“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

“Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.”

- Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

“Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer

“You don’t have to be a house to be haunted.”

- Emily Dickinson

“Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being.”

- Antonin Artaud

“Whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul to enchantment, might as well be dead, for he has already closed his eyes upon life.”

- Albert Einstein

“What you have inherited from your forefathers you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.”

- Goethe

“If you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire…”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who doesn’t fear death dies only once.”

- Giovanni Falcone

“Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.”

- Ludwig Van Beethoven

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”

- Ingrid Bergman

“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

- Humphrey Bogart

“The only true madness is loneliness,
the monotonous voice in the skull
that never stops
because never heard.”

- John Montague

“But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation, I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. For what I have always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity… “

- Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf<

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