There are four questions of value in life..
What is sacred?
Of what is the spirit made?
What is worth living for, and
what is worth dying for?
The answer to each is same.
Only love.
Except, Byron didn’t say that. Johnny Depp did, fake quoting Byron in the 1995 rom-com Don Juan DeMarco – a film I’m happy to report I’ve never seen. But I have read Childe Harold (albeit an age ago), and his work is lovely, if you have the patience for romantic poetry, which I occasionally do because language, language, language.
This fragment, these verses, I especially like, particularly on or around Earth Day, which is coming right up – on April 22 this year.
Childe Harold, Canto iv, Verses 178, & 179:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
Reading about Byron’s life, and that of his immediate circle, is more dramatic and shocking – what a roller coaster – than any film. His was the kind of life – and a brief one at that (he died at age 36) – that if you wrote a novel about all of the characters and all of the craziness, no one would buy or believe it, for truth really is stranger than fiction. If you’re interested, his wiki is linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron