Raymond; or, Life and Death: With examples of the evidence for survival of memory and affection after death.Lodge, Oliver, Sir
Religion
Raymond; or, Life and Death: With examples of the evidence for survival of memory and affection after death.
Lodge, Oliver, Sir
Future life; Lodge, Raymond, 1889-1915 (Spirit); Spiritualism; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, British
Most lives have marriages, births of children, productive years;
but the lives of the defenders of their Country are short and of
majestic simplicity. The obscure records of childhood, the few
years of school and university and constructive and inventive work,
and then the sudden sacrifice of all the promise of the future, of
work, of home, of love; the months of hard living and hard work well
carried through, the cheerful humorous letters home making it out all
very good fun; and in front, in a strange ruined and desolate land,
certain mutilation or death. And now that death has come.
Unto each man his handiwork, to each his crown,
The just Fate gives;
Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays down,
He, dying so, lives.[1]
My brother was born at Liverpool on January 25th, 1889, and was at
Bedales School for five or six years, and afterwards at Birmingham
University, where he studied engineering and was exceptionally
competent in the workshop. He went through the usual two years'
practical training at the Wolseley Motor Works, and then entered his
brothers' works, where he remained until he obtained a commission at
the outbreak of war.
His was a mind of rare stamp. It had unusual power, unusual
quickness, and patience and understanding of difficulties in my
experience unparalleled, so that he was able to make anyone
understand really difficult things. I think we were most of us
proudest and most hopeful of him. Some of us, I did myself, sometimes
took problems technical or intellectual to him, sure of a wise and
sound solution.
Though his chief strength lay on the side of mechanical and
electrical engineering it was not confined to that. He read widely,
and liked good literature of an intellectual and witty but not highly
imaginative type, at least I do not know that he read Shelley or
much of William Morris, but he was fond of Fielding, Pope, and Jane
Austen. Naturally he read Shakespeare, and I particularly associate
him with _Twelfth Night_ and _Love's Labour's Lost_. Among novelists,
his favourites, after Fielding and Miss Austen, were I believe
Dickens and Reade; and he frequently quoted from the essays and
letters of Charles Lamb.[2]
Of the stories of his early childhood, and his overflowing vitality
made many, I was too often from home to be able to speak at large.
But one I may tell. Once when a small boy at Grove Park, Liverpool,
he jumped out of the bath and ran down the stairs with the nurse
after him, out of the front door, down one drive along the road
and up the other, and was safely back in the bath again before
the horrified nursemaid could catch up with him. [_body of Memoir
incomplete, and omitted here._]
[_Close of Memoir_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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