Think About It

 Anguish
                                    Is it possible that She will get us forgiven for ambitions continually crushed, — that an affluent end will make up for the ages of indigence, — that one day of success will lull us to sleep on the shame of our fatal incompetence?
     (O palms! diamond! — Love, force! — higher than all joys and all fame! — in every respect, — everywhere, demon, god, — youth of this being here: myself!)
     And may the accidents of scientific wonders and the movements of social brotherhood be cherished as the progressive restitution of our primitive franchise.

     But the Vampire who makes us agreeable, commands us to enjoy ourselves with what she leaves us, or, in other words, that we should be more amusing.

     Wounds, from the tossings of the wearing air and the sea; torrents from the silence of the waters and murderous air; tortures that laugh in their silence abominably rough.
— Arthur Rimbaud, Anguish (entire), in Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems, Joseph M. Bernstein (ed.), pp. 206-207.

....It took me a long time, my lifetime so to speak, to realize that the colour of an eye half seen, or the source of some distant sound, are closer to Giudecca in the hell of unknowing than the existence of God, or the origins of protoplasm, or the existence of self, and even less worthy than these to occupy the wise. It's a bit much, a lifetime, to achieve this consoling conclusion, it doesn't leave you much time to profit by it....
— Samuel Beckett, from "First Love," in First Love and Other Shorts, pp. 32-33.

....In twos often they came, one hard on the other, thus, How shall I go another day? and then, How did I ever go on another day? Or, Did I kill my father? and then, Did I ever kill anyone? That kind of way, to the general from the particular I suppose you might say, question and answer too in a way, very addling. I strive with them as best I can, quickening my step when they come on, tossing my head from side to side and up and down, staring agonizedly at this and that, increasing my murmur to a scream, these are helps. But they should not be necessary, something is wrong here, if it was the end I would not so much mind, but how often I have said, in my life, before some new awful thing, It is the end, and it was not the end, and yet the end cannot be far off now, I shall fall as I go along and stay down or curl up for the night as usual among the rocks and before morning be gone. Oh I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store, that makes me happy, often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it. Where did I get it, from a dream, or a book read in a nook when a boy, or a word overheard as I went along, or in me all along and kept under till it could give me joy, these are the kind of horrid thoughts I have to contend with in the way I have said....
— Samuel Beckett, from "From an Abandoned Work," in Ibid., pp. 44-45.

....Any guides we later asked about the value of these myths always gave us what appeared to be evasive answers. "They are as true," one of them told us, "as your own fairy stories and scientific theories." "A knife," said another, "is neither true nor false. But someone who grasps it by the blade is truly in error."
— René Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 95.

    This is how I sum up for myself what I wish to convey to those who work here with me:

     I am dead because I lack desire;
     I lack desire because I think I possess;
     I think I possess because I do not try to give.
     In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
     Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
     Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;
     In desiring to become, you begin to live.
— René Daumal, from Postface, Ibid., p. 113.