Wow! My mother just used to say “Rise and shine!”

I like your method better. And it would give me a longer time to stay in bed.

My favorite quatrain, which I used to get my children up in the morning, was:
“Awake, for morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.
And the hunter of the dawn has caught
The sultan’s turret in a noose of light.”

why are they not coming from nicuragua[sic]? oh thats right they fought off the contra drug dealing mercenaries that the u.s. installed in el salvador (remember the marinol [sic] nuns murdered) guatamala and honduras.

Art Deco

You don’t know anything, and should shut up. El Salvador has had an elected government since 1982 and Guatemala since 1986. The Salvadoran civil war was settled with an armistice in 1992. The Guatemalan insurgency was suppressed by the end of 1984, then settled with a formal armistice in 1996.Nicaragua had an elected government from 1990 to 2011, when the Sandinistas began deploying massive vote fraud to stay in power.

Neo:

Art Deco:If you want to correct other commenters, that’s fine. And I value your comments here. But telling someone that he or she should shut up isn’t really in line with the atmosphere I try to keep here. So although I realize that tempers sometimes flare, I’m asking that everyone desist from that sort of thing. I also realize that I may seem very, very quaint. But it’s one of those slippery slopes.

There followed a number of fairly well-informed comments on Central America and other topics. Having already contributed snarky, misspelled, ignorant talking points of the left on Central America, wammo had nothing more to add. In effect , wammo shut up: not because Art Deco told him/her to, but because wammo had nothing but ignorant snark to add to the conversation. Which wammo had already done.

Perhaps wammo was humiliated into silence. OTOH, as wammo’s M.O. appears to be not exchange of ideas but one comment hit-and-run snark, wammo may not have even returned to the comment thread.

The idea was: the brevity of our earthly existence, and that (as Andrew Marvell wrote) “yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.”

“DNW:

It was introduced as an interesting image and idea. There was really no philosophical discussion one way or the other.

However, at the time I went to school—public school in NY—Christianity was hardly absent. For example, in my grade school, every year at Christmas the principal read to the entire assembly, aloud, excerpts from the New Testament telling the Christmas story. And we sang all the carols in their traditional forms, which were heavy on Christianity.

So no, I don’t think the “schoolmarms” were trying to say anything one way or the other about Christianity. In fact, I’m not at all sure the particular “schoolmarm” involved (who may even have been a man; I don’t remember) was aware of the source of the image.”

Well, I don’t think that they were trying to say anything about Christianity per se, either.

As for the image representing an interesting idea? I guess one would ask: “Just what exactly is that idea?”

And as existentialism was a big deal when I was in high school … all those late 50’s and 1960’s teaching school graduates, the idea as they understood, or chose to present it, was pretty clear.

That said, as you recall, a similar theme is found and remarked upon in much Old English literature, including “The Wanderer”, and “The Seafarer” … and to a lesser and more particular degree, in “The Battle of Maldon”.

It was introduced as an interesting image and idea. There was really no philosophical discussion one way or the other.

However, at the time I went to school—public school in NY—Christianity was hardly absent. For example, in my grade school, every year at Christmas the principal read to the entire assembly, aloud, excerpts from the New Testament telling the Christmas story. And we sang all the carols in their traditional forms, which were heavy on Christianity.

So no, I don’t think the “schoolmarms” were trying to say anything one way or the other about Christianity. In fact, I’m not at all sure the particular “schoolmarm” involved (who may even have been a man; I don’t remember) was aware of the source of the image.

“To clarify:

I was introduced to the image in grade school or junior high, not high school. But the person’s name was never mentioned, nor did we read his works. It was just a description of what he said, and it was so dramatic that I never forgot the image itself.”

I take it then, that the purpose was not to toss another consideration on the balance in favor of adopting the Christian world view, as in the original recounting; but rather to try and reproduce in the student mind what schoolmarms of the era saw as a kind of poetic, natural, precursor of an existentialism in which only the community in, or despite of, all its blind “thrownness” … provides the comforting warmth and that holds the lonely terrors of the frost world at bay … for a time. LOL … those schoolmarms …

Apropos of this, I remember a few years ago when some neo-pagan or militant atheist type began talking about the slaughter of gentle Woden loving folk, as a prelude to working up an indictment against the coercive persecutory missionary work of the Church. I cited Ciofi’s famous speech concerning the emptiness at the core of his pagan religion and how it was he himself who threw the spear into the temple of the idol in order to profane it.

“Yeah, but the Saxons of Germany … blah blah blah ….”