Hollywood created the biopic in the 1930s, mostly to celebrate heroes in the arts, sciences and public life, a time when schoolchildren still learnt to recite Longfellow's lines: 'Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime/ And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time'.
They all show him from behind – distant, departing, beyond reach – but at the same time very close; just as he will seem for ever.
"And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time".
Memorializing his departed colleague on the Senate floor, Senator Robert Byrd turned to the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ("Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime / And, departing, leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time").
Ernest Hemingway was an architect of the English sentence, or the American sentence if you prefer, but his poetry will be happily forgotten, not least because of the following effort, among his best: Lives of football men remind us, We can dive and kick and slug, And departing leave behind us, Hoof prints on another's mug.
Perhaps Mrs. Brown will one day read to her children the novel of adventurous loneliness by Defoe, or at least this verse from an 1838 Longfellow psalm: "Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/And, departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time......
Whatever your beliefs, most people would agree that the body we leave behind when we depart this mortal coil is just a heap of bones and flesh.
If trains departing from Penn Station are behind schedule, he might take the PATH train to Hoboken and then connect with New Jersey Transit.
A remake which furthermore leaves old-fashioned animation behind, departing for the live-action uncanny valley of hyperreal CGI, which heretically loses most of the songs and which also abandons the original's final, unforgettably exotic glimpse of a real-life human girl?
Departing leaders leave behind "continuity folders" full of lessons and AAR notes for their successors.
