"Sarah Hannah Jones was buried there after she died on September 5, 1909. There, behind St. Peter’s Church, among the markers on the grassy hill that slopes down into one of the main cargo routes to Ireland, a Celtic cross designates her gravesite. It features the curious inscription 'POET PHILOSOPHER & FAILURE.'
There is little explanation to be found about the cryptic words. The church was consecrated in 967, and the oldest parts of the physical building date back to the 8th century. Sarah’s husband, James, remarried another woman named Sarah. She died in 1929, and a year after James followed. All three are buried in the spot, their stones stacked under Sarah Hannah’s cross. James’ inscription is strange but a little less mysterious: 'ALAS POOR YORICK.'"
- via Atlas Obscura
“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”
— H.L. Mencken
Apollo and the Muses (and detail) by John Singer Sargent
American, 1921
oil on canvas
MFA Boston
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
