Life and Existence

Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

If the red slayer think he slays,

I am the doubter and the doubt.

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Webster was much possessed by death

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

Birth, and copulation, and death.

Birth, and copulation, and death.

Birth, and copulation, and death.

Midnight shakes the memory

Yet we have gone on living,

I grow old … I grow old …

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

An alien people clutching their gods.

I had seen birth and death

I had seen birth and death

This is the way the world ends

We are the hollow men.

Here we go round the prickly pear

Here I am, an old man in a dry month