We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

– t.s. eliot

The Hollow Men

This that I see—

A form storm-beaten

Bound to the rock.

Did you do wrong?

Is this your punishment?

…where am I?

Speak to a wretched wanderer…

Whatever did I do,

How ever did I sin,

That you have yoked me to calamity…

Master, grant me my prayer.

Enough—I have been tried enough—

My wandering—long wandering.

Yet I have found nowhere

To leave my misery.

I am a girl who speaks to you,

But horns are on my head.

– Io, daughter of Inachus

Upon seeing Prometheus

Prometheus Bound

“Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.”

“In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again.”

        – James Agee

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of Heaven.”

– John Milton

“The wailing of the newborn infant is intermingled with the dirge for the dead.”

– Lucretius

“...the fog is rising.”

– Emily Dickinson’s last words

“The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar.

– C.S. Lewis

Close the door, put out the light

No They won’t be home tonight

The snow falls hard, and don’t you know?

The winds of Thor are blowing cold

They’re wearing steel that’s bright and true

They carry news that must get through

They choose a path where no one goes.

– Led Zeppelin

No Quarter

“By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.

  Open, locks,

Whoever knocks!”

– Second Witch

Macbeth

“I am the Lizard King

I can do anything”

– Jim Morrison

Not to Touch the Earth

“Lord, there is none like you!

You have broken the chains that bound me

I will sacrifice in your honour.”

– St. Augustine

Confessions

Things not what they used to be

Missing one inside of me

Deathly lost, this can’t be real

Cannot stand this hell I feel

Emptiness is filling me

To the point of agony

Growing darkness taking dawn

I was me, but now he is gone.

– Metallica

Fade to Black

“In the long run, we are all dead.”

– John Maynard Keynes

"The Phoenix Bird"

- Hans Christian Anderson

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer --

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom.

– t.s. eliot

The Hollow Men

When once the Soule has lost her way,

O then, how restless does she stray!

And having not her Guide for light,

How does she erre in endlesse night!

– Robert Herrick

And here was a shock the Rooster did not notice: the wood was naked.

All in a fortnight the trees had lost their leaves to the ripping wind.

Autumn is the killing season.

– Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The Book of Sorrows

“Souls smell in Hades.”

– Heraclitus

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”  

– Lawrence Durrell

I am like shattered glass

Cutting those who touch me

I have been broken

I am hard and sharp

People can see through me.

They know I can hurt them

I am never confronted

I am always walked around.

– Lori Gauntlet

“There was a blind man who, merely by placing his hands upon an animal, could determine to what species it belonged. To test him one day, they brought him a wolf’s whelp. Long and carefully he felt the beast all over. Then, still being in doubt, he said: ‘I do not know whether thy father was a dog or a wolf, but this I do know, that I would not trust thee among a flock of sheep.’

– Aesop

The Blind man and the Whelp

“Turn your backs and keep your eyes shut tight;

for should the Gorgon come and you look at her,

never again would you return to the light.”

– Dante

Inferno (IX-6:45)

“Death is not the greatest loss in life.

The greatest loss is what dies inside us when we live.”

– Norman Cousins

“You must break the outside to let out the inside;

to get at the kernel means breaking the shell.

Even so, to find nature herself,

all likenesses have to be shattered.”

– Eckhart

“Weeping,” he chanted, “may endure the night. And what shall come with the morning?”

   And he answered himself coldly, “A funeral. A funeral.”

– Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The Book of Sorrows

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

– William Wordsworth

“One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g. music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.”

- Benedict Spinoza

Ethics, Part IV, Preface

The fish looks eagerly at the red fly

With which the fisherman will take him;

But it does not see the hook-

So it is with the poison of the world

Its danger is not realized.

– Mechthild of Magdeburg

“The destruction of your bodies then will be the starting point for a rebirth, and their dissolution, a renewal of your former happiness. But your minds will be blinded, so that you will think the contrary, and will regard the punishment (life in the body) as a boon, and the change to a better state as a degradation and an outrage. But the more righteous among you... look forward to the change.”

– Hermes