Cannongate brought out an edition of The City of Dreadful Night several
years back. I love that poem--but there are even better ones, including
"The Suicide's Bed"--or just "The Bed"--if I remember correctly--in
which an empty bed speaks of its former occupant to the other pieces of
furniture in what is truly a squalid, rented room: the kind of place
that Thomson lived in his whole adult life. What a hellish life, and
what a forward-looking talent!
Yes, we all like to think that in the future someone will discover what
we do, but now with global warming and near-misses with asteroids, and
the equivalent processes taking place in the craniums of the young, even
our greatest may simply end up molecules in the void.
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