Grandpa, once more

I guess I could say getting old is a sad process that betrays much of human nature, that family brings both the most joys and the most pains in life, that people rarely change and if so only on their own terms, that you can learn something from everyone around you…and so on.  But instead, I’ll turn to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (someone once said, and I paraphrase, that everything a man needs to know in life is in this book, a bit of a hyperbole probably, but I’m not sure it’s so far from the truth: reading it is like taking counsel from a prophet), so sitting next to my Grandpa, reading this novel, and thinking of the things you think of when in such a situation, a certain important passage from effected me (and I’m not religious in this sense, but just as much can be taken from this passage w/ a secular interpretation).

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in the place of it we have been granted a secret, a mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds.  That is why philosophers say it is impossibly on earth to conceive the essence of things.  God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, and it lives and grows on through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened and destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.  Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it.  So I think.

-from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Anyway, enough of that.


photo: my Grandpa, Lloyd Gauley, at the Sportsman Club, June 08.  ©Graeme Mitchell.

I thought of just sharing the above picture, but here are two more.


photo: my Grandma and Grandpa in their chairs, June 08.  ©Graeme Mitchell.


photo: my Grandma and Grandpa not in their chairs, June 08.  ©Graeme Mitchell.

Comments
One Response to “Grandpa, once more”
  1. Smitty says:

    The bottom two are a heartbreaking diptych. As usual the things you see in the everyday is beautiful.