SAD LINES ON THE PASSING OF MY FRIEND, DAN AMOR.

SAD LINES ON THE PASSING OF MY FRIEND, DAN AMOR. We were kindred spirits of a kind. You and I were brought together by writing and writing kept us together for over 26 years. We wrote for newspapers and magazines, wrote books of our own too. Together, we read books in literature and in politics. Books about every subject matter under the sun, because we were, both of us, men of letters, who used English words the way bricklayers use concrete blocks to build mansions. You and I built mansions with English letters and created both real and imaginative castles of information and of knowledge. You and I believed as did Francis Bacon, the prominent English philosopher and Essayist that "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man ". And so we wrote, through day and night, we wrote. And like Christopher Marlowe, you wrote "mighty lines of poetry and of prose. " Robert Frost was not sure about how the world was going to end, in fire or in ice. You and I didn't know either. But it is safe to say now, that yours ended on the writing desk. I'm the one still wondering and pondering upon what may chance upon my sunset. All great writers are at liberty to create life and to kill their characters, only they are not able to dictate their own fate, or to save their own lives, only God bestrides that province. Even though you lie there now dead, I take solace in the fact that you did not come and go quietly, like a sacrificial lamb. You announced yourself on the mountain top and your talent tarries still in the pages of books and publications, as it surely will in the commity of intellectuals forever. An ebullient and romantic character, full of wit and laughter, full still of life and English letters that will never die. For your dear wife, Celia, and the children, I can only repeat the words of Victor Hugo, that "even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise up again." Rest well, Dan Amor, my unforgettable friend. DOMINIC KIDZU