Here’s a poem called “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Requiem
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
If you think that’s morbid: The poem is also the epitaph on his grave stone where he lies buried on a mountainside in Samoa. It honestly reads as if he wrote it specifically for the purpose, doesn’t it? Like he knew he was going to die and thought, “Better have some fire-ass lyrics ready!”
Here’s what his grave looks like:
If you had to write a poem for your tombstone, what sort of poem would it be?
Reading Treasure Island (#870 on the list) has been an absolute treat so far. A lot of the books I’m going to be tackling for this project aren’t what you’d call “fun.” Some of them, I know, are going to be a lot more like “work” than the actual work I do. (Looking at you, Proust!)
Treasure Island is a straight-up adventure story, though, and I’ve honestly wanted to keep the story rolling, staying up late in some instances to listen to it. I feel…young again (?) when I’m tucked into bed listening to the adventures of young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver.
I’ve been both reading a physical copy of the book and listening to the audiobook version, which is something I’ve been doing a lot of with books I’ve read recently. I mostly listen to audiobooks when I’m falling asleep, or, as happens with stark regularity, when I randomly wake up at 3 AM and can’t get back to sleep.
I kind of enjoy reading in multiple formats. I particularly like it when I wake up in the morning and find out how many “pages” I listened to at night — it gives me a strange sense of accomplishment.
I’ll never understand people who don’t like audiobooks or say that listening to audiobooks is not “reading,” but I know they exist. The argument seems to be that media aren’t interchangeable and can’t be labeled as “reading,” which is just semantics. I wonder if the clown who wrote that article thinks reading in “braille” doesn’t count because you don’t use your eyes?
Like many people probably told Robert Louis Stevenson towards the end of his life, “That’s a strange hill to die on.”