“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Tony Bennett and the Woody Herman Herd perform “If I Ruled the World,” by Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel, on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on March 21, 1965:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 

From 2016:

I have a theory that you don’t become a full-fledged adult until you’ve weathered the death of someone with whom you are intimate, not in distant memory but at the actual moment of that person’s demise. (You get a pass if you yourself come close to dying, but not otherwise.) If that’s so, then I grew up at the end of 1995, two months shy of my fortieth birthday, when my best friend died a painful, senseless death to whose details I was fully and agonizingly privy.

Read the whole thing here.

“Die the way you lived—all of a sudden.”

Oliver H.P. Garrett and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenplay for Manhattan Melodrama(spoken in the film by Clark Gable)

James Earl Jones reads an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Othello at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.”

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Forgive my absence from the blog this week—I was, as Patrick O’Brian would say, overpressed with sail, and I needed some time to myself to get caught up. I’m now ready at last to resume regular postings.

Longtime readers of “About Last Night” will remember my friend Laura Demanski, who used to co-blog with me under the pseudonym “Our Girl in Chicago” once upon a time. Laura and I are still the closest of friends, and I’ve been mourning the recent death of her mother Lucile, about whom you can read more here. Laura wrote her obituary, and did so with elegant simplicity.

My heart goes out to Laura, and to Greg Demanski, her father. It is, as I know all too well, a devastating thing to lose either a parent or a spouse. May your thoughts be with Laura and Greg in their time of trial.