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Mr. House's avatar

almost had me thinking you were channeling this for a moment:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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Mark Bisone's avatar

I mentioned Aragorn's speech at the Black Gate recently, which I'll reproduce here:

"Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers.

"I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

"A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day!

"This day we fight!

"By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!"

It's a fictional speech (as is King Harry's at Agincourt, lest we forget).

Some gray and bedraggled office drone (a creature in heavy supply these days) might just sniff at it and draggle onwards, his heart dying in his chest of cheap carbs and boredom.

Then there's the exotic panoply of pansies, boylovers, queef-sniffers and Halloween monsters, who will screech and howl until their gizzards burst about the chauvinism, the bigotry, the colonialism, the litany of secret -ists and phantom -phobes.

And finally there's the mass: an unimaginably vast and lazy river of human shapes, flowing from uninspired thought to unexamined action, tumbling over and over, heedless of any possible past or future, innocent not by virtue or form but by their own need to escape their need to escape, to bend the antennae inward, to Netfilx-and-chill.

And then there's the rest of us.

Thank you, Sir John, for reminding me. As you say, the past three years have visited many horrors on us, and many thieves. I try not to reveal too much personal information about myself, for reasons of strategy. But I will say this: someone very important was stolen from me early on. Not by the virus, but by the ensuing panic, and the outrageously unscientific rules that accompanied it. This person died in my arms. Or was dead in my arms, I guess, after my numerous attempts to revive her. Though I didn't realize it at the time, it forged something very hard and sharp in me, and I know I'm far from alone.

Thanks for reminding all of us of how such steel is made, and also that the forging process isn't the end but the beginning. I think we must all become something like Aragorn now. A lot of us have been comfortable just wandering alone in the woods, feeding ourselves with our hard-earned skills and feeling vaguely proud about that. But there's a very important call, and we all need to answer it now. Strike while the iron's hot, perhaps.

But thanks as well for this right here:

"So now, here you are.

"You’ve been tested as few have ever been tested before.

"All of us have, and most of us have been found wanting. As the bad cat said, there’s no shame in failing a test with a 10% pass rate.

"But there is glory in passing it, and I want you to bask in that glory for a moment, for you now stand among the elect."

When I read this, I shed a manly tear, that turned into an eagle, that flew off to Proxima Centauri!

Okay not really, but I did feel some measure of glory, at least for a moment. Maybe that's the best way to indulge; a sip and nothing more. But it was one helluva sip.

God bless, brother. Having you back in action is the best of all tonics.

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