I've just read that Ken Kesey died this morning, in his Oregon home, aged 66. I am yet to read his books, as well as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test, but I know a little about him and his Merry Pranksters, the Kool-Aid Test, and Further, his famous bus. I know enough to feel a sort of beating of the wings of history: there goes another man of whom and of whose I'll be reading. And up until this morning, it was possible to actually talk to him. But not any more.

His friend, Ken Babbs, eulogized him in his (Babbs') site, IntrepidTrips. Interestingly, the eulogy invokes a passage from Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, a book I'm currently reading. I brought a different passage from it in a previous entry. Babbs cites the passage as coming from some "Book of Days", but books of days are themselves collections and anthologies, so it is indeed Dunsany's passage, word by word. A trivial issue, really, but an interesting synchronicity for me.

Here's the passage:

He stole away over crisp grass one morning, and the old witch did not call him back for she had no spell to curb the love of roving in man. She would not hold back his limbs when his heart was gone to the woods where dead flowers hung on brown stalks and the petals turned to slime if he fingered them for November was come and the frosts were abroad all night.

afterthought: the music was incidental; I don't match music to LJ content.