jes
"winks"
olson

unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. it's not.

the only way out
...
is through

your absence has gone through me
like thread through a needle.
everything i do is stitched with its color.

out of the night that covers me,
      black as the pit from pole to pole,
i thank whatever gods may be
      for my unconquerable soul.

in the fell clutch of circumstance
      i have not winced nor cried aloud.
under the bludgeonings of chance
      my head is bloody, but unbowed.

beyond this place of wrath and tears
      looms but the horror of the shade,
and yet the menace of the years
      finds and shall find me unafraid.

it matters not how strait the gate,
      how charged with punishments the scroll,
i am the master of my fate,
      i am the captain of my soul.

this, then, is the human problem:
  - there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness
  - we cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain
  - by remembering the past, we can plan for the future
  - but the ability to plan for pleasure is
                                            offset
          by the ability to dread pain, and to fear the unknown

furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and the future
gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present

in other words:
  we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious
    are outweight by its disadvantages
  where extreme sensitivity makes us un-adaptable
  under these circumstances we feel in conflict with our own bodies
    and the world around them, and it is consoling to be able to think
    that in this contradictory world we are but
                                    ~*~strangers and pilgrims~*~

for if our desires are out of accord with anything the finite world
can offer, it might seem that our nature is not of this world

that our hearts are made, not for the finite, but for *infinity*

the discontent of our souls would appear to be the sign and seal

                            of their divinity

life is but a dream for the dead
    swim in illusion
    or sink in dread

wheresoever you go,
go with all your heart.

despite everything, it's still you.

love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
eat i must, and sleep i will, — and would that night were here!
but ah! — to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
would that it were day again! — with twilight near!

love has gone and left me and i don't know what to do;
this or that or what you will is all the same to me;
but all the things that i begin i leave before i'm through, —
there's little use in anything as far as i can see.

love has gone and left me, — and the neighbors knock and borrow,
and life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse, —
and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
there's this little street and this little house.