Anguish

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

Oh, what can ail thee knight at arms

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.” 1

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recoverthis time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

 

Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!

I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.

 

To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.

Alas, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate?And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity!Thus spoke the Devil to me once: Even God has his Hell: it is his love for man.And I lately heard him say these words: God is dead; God has died of his pity for man.

The discontented man finds no easy chair.

The mass of men lead lives of quietdesperation. What is called resignation isconfirmed desperation.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

I do not know, but I feel it happen and am in agony.

 

My specter around me night and day Like a wild beast guards my way. My emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my sin.

Wise wretch! with pleasures too refin’d to please; With too much spirit to be e’er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought. You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.

The name of the slough was Despond.

You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

I see a lily on thy brow

Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

No human thing is of serious importance.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.