we reach; we fall @eithre - Tumblr Blog

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les miserables (2012) -

alexander (2004) - behind the scenes - theatrical release - hephaistion - alexander - ptolemy - cleitus jared leto - colin farrell - elliott cowan - gary stretch

nb: i have auditory processing disorder so mistakes may happen with subtitles

“If you’ve ever seen someone you loved lying dead, you'll know. That wasn’t my wife—that stranger lying there, with that waxen face. When I stood in the crematorium next to my old friend George Bernard Shaw, the one thought in my mind was that death is the ugliest mockery of all.” I said I knew what he meant. But why, I wondered, was he telling this to me? Wells looked at me with those great solemn eyes. “You know the cremation service,” he said. “That awful moment when they put the casket in, and you know it’s all over? That was the moment Shaw chose to whisper to me, ‘Harry, go and look at the flames.’ I was so angry that I could have struck him. “But he whispered to me again, ‘Harry, you'll never regret it,’ and somehow I had to go.” “It must have been a frightful moment,” I said, thinking of Shaw, with that great bushy beard, bending sideways to whisper in the little chapel. His smile was so kindly that it seemed like pity. “I wasn’t frightened,” he said gently. “It was the greatest consolation I have ever known. To see those flames with their dancing golden glow, like a cottage fireside on a winter’s night, made me see the purpose of it all. It made me realize that what I had seen on that deathbed was not my wife at all—that here, in these flames, was her spirit.” He paused, then very quietly he said, “No man should see what he loves lying dead, but in the spirit of flame.” Presently he went below, and I was left alone by the rail, thinking. Not lying dead, but in the spirit of the flame. Or, at least, I thought, in the spirit, whether it be flame, earth or even water. I looked at the Atlantic, blue-green on this summer morning, flecked by the white phosphorescent gleam of the wake. Was not this the ultimate truth of the sea, not the death agonies of wood and steel that I had seen off St. Nazaire? If I could know that and remember it, I should not mourn so keenly again.

H.G. Wells to Harry Gattridge, then First Officer of RMS Scythia —from Captain of the Queens (1956), by Captain Harry Gattridge

The conversation took place not long after Gattridge had survived the traumatic sinking of HMT Lancastria on 17th June 1940. The Lancastria, after being bombed while evacuating troops and refugees from France, went down with a conservative estimate of 5,300 people on board (some say it was as high as 7,000 or even 9,000). Only 2,477 were saved.

#quotes #h g wells #captain gattridge #harry gattridge #did not expect to come across this #anyway i really like this quote #also you can totally ask me stuff/talk to me about the sinking of the lancastria #currently picking apart the utter fucking nonsense people have said about it