I love this piece on Seamus Heaney by Sven Birkets. Read the whole thing, the ending made me weep on this dark snowy morning. But here is an excerpt.
Auden wrote of the moment of Yeats’s death that ‘he became his admirers’, and I had the strongest feeling just then of what he meant. I conjured all at once, if this is possible, the idea, the emotional image, of all of those who knew and loved Seamus, or knew and loved his work — or both — and I felt inside the ghostly trace of a circuitry. That in this one moment all over the world, and of course most densely in Ireland, in Dublin, and most overwhelmingly on his own home ground in Sandymount, this same shock of incomprehension — not yet bereavement — was being registered. I pictured one person after another, dozens perhaps, and these were only the people who I knew who had a connection. Of course there were hundreds, many hundreds more.
When I drove down to the general store the next morning to get The New York Times and The Boston Globe, that sense was confirmed. There was massive front-page coverage everywhere — the biggest I’d ever seen for the death of a writer.
Sheila I had a strange thought while reading this and it’s way off topic. It’s hard to feel bad for super rich rock’n roll stars but do you know who is having a tough few months? Our Irish brother Bono. These last three very large lights that have gone out starting with Seamus to Lou Reed and now Mandela all have one thing in common: Bono was tight with them. I seem to remember either reading or watching him give personal remembrances for each of them. I mean it sucks for us mortals to lose these guys but we didn’t personally know them- although Seamus sure seemed like a gentle uncle to many. Anyway I have no point to make it was just a passing thought.
Really good point. Yes, rough year for him, I imagine he is devastated.
I was going to say he probably wasn’t too upset about Thatcher passing this year but with him you never know.