R. I. P., Alan Rickman

More sad news to add to the start of this year. First David Bowie, and now Alan Rickman. Both 69, both died of cancer.

Rickman was simply one of the greatest actors of our time. And a great humanist. Marvelous actor, marvelous man. Why do such beautiful people have to go, while monsters like Dick Cheney still walk about? 

Here's an obituary from The Guardian. And a beautiful tribute to him by his friend Katherine Viner.

And here's an excerpt from the poem "Rugby Chapel" by Matthew Arnold:

What is the course of the life

Of mortal men on the earth?—

Most men eddy about

Here and there—eat and drink,

Chatter and love and hate,

Gather and squander, are raised

Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,

Striving blindly, achieving

Nothing; and then they die—

Perish;—and no one asks

Who or what they have been,

More than he asks what waves,

In the moonlit solitudes mild

Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,

Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

And there are some, whom a thirst

Ardent, unquenchable, fires,

Not with the crowd to be spent,

Not without aim to go round

In an eddy of purposeless dust,

Effort unmeaning and vain.

Ah yes! some of us strive

Not without action to die

Fruitless, but something to snatch

From dull oblivion, nor all

Glut the devouring grave!