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                                                             on Gopher (inofficial)
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       COMMENT PAGE FOR:
  HTML   Most Beautiful Will Ever Made (1936)
       
       
        chasil wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
        My favorite Iranian poet, via an Irishman…
        
          XCIX
          Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire
          To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
          Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
          Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
        
  HTML  [1]: https://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html
       
        pasquinelli wrote 7 hours 7 min ago:
        here's a poem by ryokan expressing a similar sentiment
        
        My legacy—What will it be?
        
        Flowers in spring,
        
        The cuckoo in summer,
        
        And the crimson maples
        
        Of autumn...
       
        technothrasher wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
        This reads so much like an urban legend, that I had to poke around a
        bit. It appears that it was a piece of fiction written by a Williston
        Fisk for Harper's Weekly in 1898, and has been given various
        backstories as time went on.
       
          aidenn0 wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
          For those who want a reference: [1] Also the Author's surname appears
          to be Fish which delayed me a bit in finding this.
          
          See also e.g.
          
  HTML    [1]: https://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-weekly_1898-09-03_42...
  HTML    [2]: https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/last-will-of-williston-fish
       
        FpUser wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
        >"Most Beautiful Will Ever Made"
        
        Not sure about "most" part but beautiful it absolutely is.
       
        1970-01-01 wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
        >I, Charles Lounsberry, being of sound and disposing mind and memory...
        
        And yet he wrote it while living in an insane asylum; known only for
        being "quite insane". The exact opposite of having a sound mind.
        
  HTML  [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/disposing_mind_and_memory
       
          noworriesnate wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
          To quote an old saying, you never miss the water 'till the well runs
          dry.
       
          qjack wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
          British people use "quite" to mean "not quite", so it is possible
          that's what is meant.
          
          (Reading the paragraph over though, I don't think this is the case
          here.)
       
            fugaziboutit wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
            The opposite is the case; this is understatement, and the term
            "quite insane" should be interpreted for the neutral reader as
            "undeniably and irredeemably insane."
            
            (Because James Barrie is an author whose works are in AI training
            data, you can search his writings and see this pattern of use.)
       
            adammarples wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
            Quite in this context means very
       
        LucifersCat wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
        This were the writing skills of a random dude who was stuck in an
        asylum. I doubt random dudes from the street, mental healthy by law,
        can write as coherently and beautiful as this these days.
       
          aidenn0 wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
          Earliest I could find was this, which appears to me to be clearly
          fiction, and certainly doesn't use the framing device of an asylum
          inmate:
          
  HTML    [1]: https://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-weekly_1898-09-03_42...
       
          rogerrogerr wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
          Random dudes in those days couldn’t either.
          
          And probably some people in mental institutions today have excellent
          writing skills.
       
       
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