‘The sure extinction that we travel to’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“I don’t know that I ever expected much of life,” Philip Larkin wrote to his lifelong friend Kingsley Amis in October 1979, “but it terrifies me to think it’s nearly over.” He had another six years of life left, but the emptiness of the end—”the total emptiness for ever,/The sure extinction that we travel to”—was much on his mind.

The poem from which those lines originate, “Aubade,” was published in 1977 in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Larkin had started it in 1974, worked at it that year, and then left it until 1977, when he finished it. “Death is the most important thing about life,” he wrote his companion, Monica Jones, when they were both still young.

By 1977, he had not been writing much poetry and he had taken to describing his existence in letters to friends as a sort of death-in-life:
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Today in History: June 22

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s attempted invasion of the Soviet Union, was launched 75 years ago today with an air and ground attack at several locations on what became the Eastern Front. More than three million Axis soldiers faced off against a similar number of Soviet soldiers.

Ultimately, it did not work. The USSR withstood and eventually repelled the invasion, but Nazi Germany’s invasion set a record which still stands: it was the largest invasion force ever mounted, the single largest military operation ever mounted, with four million total soldiers on one side alone, along the longest front line: 1800 miles. When it was all over, the invasion led to the fight over the Eastern Front, a years-long fight which saw more death and destruction than was seen in the entire rest of World War II: 26 million individuals lost their lives in the fight for the Eastern Front.

Adolph Hitler thought the Soviet Union would fall in three months. He was wrong.

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The Beatles (above, with Pete Best) participated in the group’s first-ever studio recording session 55 years ago today in Hamburg, Germany. Among the songs recorded were “My Bonnie” and “Cry for a Shadow,” an instrumental that remains the only song credited to the songwriting pair of George Harrison and John Lennon. “Cry for a Shadow” (after the jump):
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My Duck Companion

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If you are reading this page on a Windows browser, there should be a logo on left side of the tab at top, a little green-brown-yellow blob. I first placed it there as an inside joke with myself, but the story is worth sharing. The full-size photo is at the top. (Most of this first appeared in a post from December 2013, “A Duck About Town.”)

It is a photo of a duck. The photo was taken in 2013, and it was added at the last second on the very first post written later that year. If you have looked at this web site once or a thousand times (thanks, mom!), the duck has been there, on whatever device you use, each time. It is this site’s mascot, a companion to each piece I write.
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