It is spring here, at least until the election, when the winter of my discontent will I suspect, begin rather than, being made glorious summer by this son of pork. Moving on, my cataract surgery went very well and I am looking forward to taking some photos at the cabin this summer. I recently got some pulp magazines on dvd and thought I would share this illustration by Virgil Finlay for "The Red God Laughed". Which appeared in Weird Tales, for April 1939. The story in brief, concerns the visit to Earth by Thvall the Seeker, a kind of squishy, soft bodied alien who is visiting 21st Century Nu Yok. But while the incredible city, with four thousand foot high towers still stands, it seems Asia and America have unleashed poison gas rockets, yes they started it, and destroyed almost all life on earth, except deep sea fishes, worms and plants. So Thrall, who is looking for a world with water for his dying planet, wiggles around casting aspersions on the likelihood of a race with rigid skeletons developing intelligence. Until that is he fiddles with an unexploded canister and well, Merwin's poem sort of sums it up.
"Merwin’s great single-line poem—not the greatest short poem, but perhaps the shortest great poem, ever written—is about the converse problem, that of outliving. This is the poem in its entirety:"
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-final-prophecy-of-w-s-merwin"Who would I show it to"
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