Since this is poetry corner over here, I will include a poem that was used in his eulogy:
Dis altyd jy, net altyd jy,
die een gedagte bly my by
soos skadu's onder bome bly,
net altyd jy, net altyd jy.
die een gedagte bly my by
soos skadu's onder bome bly,
net altyd jy, net altyd jy.
Langs baie weë gaan my smart,
blind is my oë en verward,
is alle dinge in my hart.
blind is my oë en verward,
is alle dinge in my hart.
Maar dit sal een en enkeld bly,
en aards en diep sy laafnis kry,
al staan dit winter, kaal in my,
die liefde in my, die liefde in my.
en aards en diep sy laafnis kry,
al staan dit winter, kaal in my,
die liefde in my, die liefde in my.
He was a book collector, specifically poetry books, and the bulk of his poetry collection, something like 60,000 volumes, was left to Emory University. What can I say - he traveled a long, at times rocky road, from the Bronx to Capetown. He enjoyed life, was endlessly fascinating to talk to and he will be missed by those of us who knew him.
Godspeed, Raymond, I am a better person for having known you.
6 comments:
Alas. As we age, so to do all of our friends and family. Sad but true, we live long enough to see those around us pass on before we do. The best we can hope is that we have lived a good life, contributed to the world, or at least didn't do any harm and maybe even have left a legacy like your BIL.
We planted a new bare root cherry tree yesterday to replace the lost pie cherry tree and act as a cross pollinator to the Black Tartans. I guess the orchard will be our legacy :-) When we are dead, someone can make a cherry pie.
Thank you for the link to the guitarist! I love classical guitar music and took lessons when I was younger. I have been binge listening since clicking the link!
Excellent, enjoy the music, enjoy the pies and as I recall, your teacher later went on to a bit of fame with the Jefferson Airplane. Heady times indeed.
Six hundred million dollars?!?! Well, I don't know his life story but you said he's a world renowned sculptor and I can't imagine any but the tiniest fraction of artists amassing that kind of a fortune on their work alone. So my guess is he made it in real estate or business or investments that panned out or a combination of all three. Not that any of this counts and it's none of my business, I was just floored by that figure. Or maybe he married into some of it and added to that. That's a nice way to get there.
To show you how insane we are about money, I could've been comfortable with the X income I had coming in for the rest of my life but I got it into my head that I HAD to have X and a half income, gambled on a "sure thing," and now I have to make it on half X. Such is life for us Fredos.
Sir Henry fought in WWI, got gassed in the trenches, suffered with lung problems for the rest of his life. He earned every dime of that 600 mil himself, often through hard labor. He was, however, very fortunate in his timing and he managed to find a good gallery to promote his work. And his work is everywhere - if I drive over to Capital City - big ol' piece by Uncle Hank. UN? Got 'em. NYC, Chicago, London, Paris - you name the city, there is his stuff. And that figure for his net worth was calculated 30+ years ago - death is only a net positive for an artist's career.
I had a financial goal once, too. I had a nice number picked out, but I lost my job several years before I would have reached it, theoretically. So, like you, I make do.
As the old joke goes "Are you comfortable?" "Eh, I get by." And so it goes here in the real world.
But before I leave this subject, let me say that I much prefer the work of Alexander Calder, American, and while I have no idea what his net worth was when he died, it probably exceeded my ex-BiL's FiL by at least two times.
Calder was Scottish, and worked every day. Over the course of 50 years he produced something like 25,000 works. Talk about productivity! And from all accounts, he was a lot more fun to be around than that sour old Dough Boy.
I assume we're talking about Henry Moore. I saw a documentary about him once and the only moving thing about it for me was that in part of the documentary he was photographed attempting to convert a Cezanne study of a woman's back into a Moore sculpture of a woman's back. If you know Cezanne you know how lumpy he made his women and Moore saw something in that. And he was going to school on it. Here was this master sculpture making this small lumpy study after Cezanne. And it's true. The great ones never do graduate from being beginners, from starting over, again.
He had a different way of seeing things, and one of the things he liked to do was use a painting as an idea source for a sculpture, turning a 2D work into something that could be viewed in the round. That is an interesting exercise, and for whatever reason (there are a couple I can think of) he liked lumpy women, NTTAWWT, IYKWIM AITYD.
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