A Giant has left us.

Stephen Sondheim died unexpectedly yesterday.

Reflecting in honor of Sondheim:

Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Others may deceive you - you decide what's good. You decide alone, but no one is alone. People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes, holding to their own, thinking they're alone. Honor their mistakes. Fight for their mistakes. Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what's right. You decide what's good. — from “Into the Woods.”

...suddenly, you are left alone with a body that cannot love you and a will that cannot save you. But just as suddenly, now, like the whisper of rain in the leaves of a dark forest, a rumor of Creation runs through your dark blood. – after Rilke, Book of Hours.

How it is that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship. – James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Mariner Books; 1st Edition (August 14, 2001).