There is no point

There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist.

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life

What is this relish for living, la joie de vivre, they talk about nowadays? The hunger for God, the thirst for immortality, for survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful pleasure-taking in the life that is fleeting and does not abide. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life be unending, which most often leads us to long for death. ‘If I am to be altogether annihilated,’ we say to ourselves, ‘the world is finished for me, it is over. And why not let it come to an end as soon as possible, so that no new consciousness will have to come into being and suffer the tormenting deceit of a transient and apparential existence? If the illusion of life is destroyed and life for life’s sake or for the sake of others who must also die does not satisfy our soul, then what is the point of living? Death is our best release.’ And so we sing dirges to death, the never-ending respite, simply from fear of it, and call it a liberation.

Miguel de Unamuno.

How Long ?

How long's a tear take take to dry ?

The Poetry Of The Corpse

Dust is the signature of lost time/a mix of boredom and death.

Genesis iii 19 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.

To Do Today

"So much to do today:/kill memory, kill pain,/turn heart into a stone,/and yet prepare to live again."

Anna Akhmatova

Out of the world!

The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery,
Swift to be hurl'd --
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!

"The Bridge of Sighs" by Thomas Hood

I love ....

'Tis Winter, and I love to read indoors,
When the Moon hangs her crescent up on high;
While on the window shutters the wind roars,
And storms like furies pass remorseless by.
How pleasant on a feather bed to lie,
Or, sitting by the fire, in fancy soar
With Dante or with Milton to regions high,
Or read fresh volumes we've not seen before,
Or o'er old Burton's Melancholy pore.

From John Clare, The Winter's Come

The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll

They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this Photoshopped age of unreliable narrators, much remains the same. The assassination of President John Kennedy, the Crime of the Last Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands—yet exactly what happened remains in dispute. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald, fellow traveler of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission found that Oswald, who two days later would be murdered by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acted alone...more here

SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST

In Through the Looking Glass, when Alice declares that she cannot believe impossible things, the White Queen advises her to practise. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”...more here