Quoting Camus

Albert Camus was the great French existentialist, and the most important writer in the modern age in French, and maybe any language. He, himself, was not interested in death memorials. He is very quotable, and people may pick up a sentence of his without knowing it was from him.

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.  — Return to Tipasa (1952)

« Au milieu de l'hiver j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été. »

translation found in 1960s English anthologies:
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day Association

recent statues in Cleveland's Lake View

Lake View Cemetery Cleveland bills itself as 'Cleveland's Outdoor Museum', and they have a point.  Recently they have added to their monuments.

Some they write up in their bi-yearly newsletter, and sometimes a new statue gets an article in the city's daily. Such as this one, by Rosa Serra for the family of Mark A. Smith. This bronze lion is a Spanish bronze that looks like stone. It is modeled after the character, Mufasa, in the movie Lion King. It still has the cemetery's temporary marker on site.

a more traditional lion photographed 5 August 2011

Sergey Gaidaenko by Ivan Grigoriev

This new statue is accompanied by a poem's line from Robert Browning, “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?”

family plots

Cordoned off in iron chains, and hollow tassels. Clink, clink, to keep something away?

After the years these stone stanchions are persuaded by gravity. At one time, these were connected too.

Knight of Pythias

The emblem in the center is a crest of the fraternal secret society, the Knights of Pythias. They are modeled, like so many, after the Freemasons.  The F.C. B. stands for "Friendship, Charity, Benevolence".

seeing faces

from a certain angle and distance, a laughing face appears, like a comedy mask

dodgy surnames