Eric Boehlert

Everybody who has spent a lot of time on the internet knows what it’s like to lose someone who you never knew in so-called real life, but still felt very much like you did. Somehow this news felt personally crushing to me, although I never met Boehlert:

The best laborer dead.

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?

Yeats, “To a Child Dancing in the Wind”