Alone In The Ether Quotes

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it is violent? Can you love it even when it does not love me?

I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed

So when people say we¡re alone in the ether?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.

You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.

She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.

Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.

I want you to say everything, anything. I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.

I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.

A wise man doesn’t answer a multifaceted question with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response alone. A one-word reply for an issue is a kindergarten response that has no value or meaning. Two people could basically feel the same way about an issue but still argue about it and possibly even come to hate each other because they settled on different one-word answers.

When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

In understanding the nature and the bigger picture of the game from an omniscient viewpoint, a player could manifest his own destiny infinitely more effectively than any two-dimensional-thinking dimwit on the street who repeatedly walked straight into brick walls, thinking a different outcome would magically materialize through persistence alone.

So when people say were alone in the ether?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.

it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice.

For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

You wouldn't make love with him, you'd make art.

he doesn't want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.

The world loved to take a beautiful woman and exclaim at the charm of her single imperfection

Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn't matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.

So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.

There are no perfect circles, Regan. Yes, there’s one, and it’s this one: They fall in love because they’re always in love. That’s circular, not a circle. He can believe whatever he wants; she knows it’s a perfect circle.

Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not.

He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please. She kisses him back and she does.

Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.

... so this is for us. This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and love and this is for doing it even if no one will ever know because the beauty is in the act of doing it. Not what it can lead to. This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playing and no one is around and they will never know but I will forever remember and that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have, and this is for you who write or play or read or sing by yourself with the light off and door closed when the world is asleep and the stars are aligned and maybe no one will ever hear it or read your words or know your thoughts but it doesn’t make it less glorious. It makes it ethereal. Mysterious. Infinite. For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe in and only you can decide how much it meant and means and will forever mean and other people will experience it too through you. Through your spirit. Through the way you talk. Through the way you walk and love and laugh and care and I never meant to write this long but what I want to say is: Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story. Let your very identity be your book. Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody. So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountain where no one will ever hear and your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar. Make your life be your art and you will never be forgotten.

It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn't stop when she met his eye.

That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don't go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun. Don't go, don't go, don't go.

She couldn't prevent the urge to know his thoughts, She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he'd secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.

Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it. Damn it, I love him. Then, after the smoke cleared, she could see nothing else.

It was at moments like this, high enough to inhale the promise of risk, that the whittled lines of city streets brought out his lingering melancholy; that l'appel du vide, the call of the void.

Things were always stranger in retrospect, which was a funny little consequence of time.

Pretty, that's what you think this is? You think that's all she's capable of? You fool, she's done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to filly focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn't, its Truth. She tomd the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitylessly. So carelessly.

Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her. What a waste, and then he says aloud, JesusfuckingChrist what have you done to me? And she says, Kiss me.

The title of the café suggested its New Age influence, but he had no idea the place would be littered with spiritual knickknacks and completely brimming with wishy-washy clientele sporting tie-dye shirts and earthy-colored, grungy pants. Dale gritted his teeth and painfully examined the place, taking in all its awfulness. The atmosphere alone felt like it was soiling his impeccable suit.

For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.

Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.

Art is something we do to feel human, not because we are.

She'd always thought [him] so ethereally powerful, so detached from the realm of mortals. But he was human after all, smaller and thinner than the rest of them. And for the first time in his life, he was alone.

this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.

She'd given him arrows and he'd shot, and now parts of her were gaping holes, flayed and filleted and left behind as open wounds.

When Aldo spoke of Regan his voice had a tendency to change, illumination rising near his cheeks. "You should see her work," he would say the same way someone else might have said: Come outside, come look at the stars.

The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.

this is when she knows- god, she knows- that she loves him so deeply and so passionately and so devastatingly that by the time she tells him, the words will inevitably feel empty and small.

She couldn't look away from his face, which did not say: What's wrong with you? but instead, said: Hi. Hello. Nice to meet you.

Maybe that's the big secret, that even though she hates her feelings, she'd still rather have them than not.

What did you learn?" he asked neutrally. That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.

he was gripped with terror, understanding now what it really meant to love something. That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore lo love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.

She stared at herself in the mirror and thought: My eyes are too big, everyone will know I've seen everything, they'll know I saw the universe itself. They will look at me and they'll think: This poor girl, she knows too much, she can't go back.

He matched her distance again, their foreheads meeting like old friends; Hello, how are you, been a long time, how nice it is to be here with you.

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it's violent? Can you love it when it doesn't love me?

He would come to share her joys until he could no longer separate them from his own, and then one day, maybe turning to her at a party or rushing to ask in a text message, he would say: What's that thing I like? And she would know the answer. She would know everything. Eventually, all the answers to all that he was would be cradled in the palms of her hands.

she wanted to bear his entire sadness for him: to hurt herself doubly, just to keep it from him, and was that illness or love? Was she really so broken that she wanted to suffer to spare him, and if that was true, then had he been right all along?

It's a fire. I used to burn out, now I just burn.

the truth is that I have no choice but to accept that what's in my head is what's real.

That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.

Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been.

Art, a voice buzzed in her ear, was creation. It was dissecting a piece of herself and leaving it out for consumption, for speculation. For the possibility of misinterpretation and the inevitability of judgment. For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice.

Softly the breezes from the forest came, Softly they blew aside the taper's flame; Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower; Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone; Lovely the moon in ether, all alone: Sweet too, the converse of these happy mortals, As that of busy spirits when the portals Are closing in the west; or that soft humming We hear around when Hesperus is coming. Sweet be their sleep.

Time. Once upon a time. Time to begin. Time and time again. Time after time. Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.

She did that, love him invasively, exploring him like the depths of the sea.

I want you to bet on me, Aldo. I want you to make investments, I want your future.” The last part slipped out. “I want your future, Aldo. I want it for me.

the body will do almost anything to feel nothing.

The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking

Sometimes I feel like I'm just waiting for something that will never happen," he said. "Like I'm just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I'm just wasting space, or because if I don' answer the phone my dad will he alone. But it's an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don't know, nothing. Like I'm just an algorithm that someone put in place.

Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.

She is my hope and for that she is dangerous, unequivocally, but she is also alive, unreservedly.

Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?” “It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,” he said. “They believed light needed to pass through something, only Einstein proved light can be particles, which don't need a medium to travel through. And before that," he added, " ether was what they called the air in the realm of the gods. A shining, fluid substance." “So when people say were alone in the ether...?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.

He thinks of all the other versions of himself making love to all the other versions of her and resolves to pluck them out of their alternate realities, out of their alternate spaces and times, to place them in this one.

She cannot be, even in resurrection, what she was in life.

You wouldn't make love with him, you'd make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy.

Commitment is fine,” he said. “Theoretically, anyway. But I find I have some difficulty understanding what other people want from me.

She should know right now that the secrets of the universe aren't in his dick. Had he checked? He's familiar with the real estate.

Why was her ship sinking? Her ship? It's always sinking, she hates it, it's either sinking or it's exploding, either way it never seems to be going anywhere.

She'd have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do.

Art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It's the pealed lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It's him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he'll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you've always understood that. You've always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.

To give into something all at once was to lose yourself completely, and therefore to resist was to exchange one fleeting moment of pleasure for a more exquisite, abounding pain.

her honesty with him was just another version of a lie.

It isn't constancy that keeps us alive, it's the progression we use to move us.

When you learn how to be alone you’ll discover the difference between alone and lonely.

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.

The dark tips of her nails traveled the shape of his upper lip, curving with it, and in another version of this precise moment, he said, Regan, come closer, let's see what happens, let's see how the stars shine on your skin.

She proved herself alive by proving this day had never been lived before, that this thing had never been felt or never tasted or never wanted, and now, because it existed, things were different; changed.

You can’t fix me,” she whispered to him, her mouth tracing his neck. Do you understand, do you know what you hold in your hands, do you know how readily it breaks? “I don’t see anything to fix,” he said.

He loved her fiercely for that. He didn't see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that the could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship whit time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.

He wondered what a bee would do if it knew its life work was contributing to the ecosystems of fancy toasts. Would that be enough to compel it to stop? Doubtful.

She proved herself alive by proving this day had never been lived before, that this thing had never been felt or never tasted or never wanted...

when they embark, they will have each turned a corner. And everything will be as it was, only very slightly different.

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent? Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

Everything is uncertain, he and she both know that by now, but there is a smaller certainty within all of the uncertainty, which is: The Truth. And what, he asks, is The Truth? That she will keep turning corners until she finds him.

What you’re seeing is a single intake of breath - one moment. It is the beauty of the world in its most objective state, because the artist isn’t expressing any meaning. He isn’t trying to define you or teach you or tell you what place to occupy.

Because I know he'll sit for me. Because I know he won't mock me, won't suffocate me, won't kill this this fragile little thing I've found, this fledgling breath I've taken. Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he's the thing I can't unsee. Because I don't know if I can get him right without looking, without proof, but also because I need to know, because I've already tried. Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.

The glow from the window illuminated pieces of their silhouettes, her right side and his left. With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other's reflection.

Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her

You have to take back your life, Aldo," she said, suddenly admonishing. "You can't just live in your past lives." "I wasn't aware that I was.

Yes, how perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

If you could open only one part of me for your consumption, for your delectation, for the whims of your carnivorous mind, which part would you wish to see?

His name is written on my skin, he scarred me, I’ve changed my entire shape for having fit within the enormity of his thoughts, and now the only words I know are lines and color.

That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.

I don’t think it counts as learning it if you don’t know what you learned.

Masks! I see them everywhere. That dreadful vision of the other night - the deserted town with its masked corpses in every doorway; that nightmare product of morphine and ether - has taken up residence within me. I see masks in the street, I see them on stage in the theatre, I find yet more of them in the boxes. They are on the balcony and in the orchestra-pit. Everywhere I go I am surrounded by masks. The attendants to whom I give my overcoat are masked; masks crowd around me in the foyer as everyone leaves, and the coachman who drives me home has the same cardboard grimace fixed upon his face! It is truly too much to bear: to feel that one is alone and at the mercy of all those enigmatic and deceptive faces, alone amid all the mocking laughs and the threats embodied in those masks. I have tried to persuade myself that I am dreaming, and that I am the victim of a hallucination, but all the powdered and painted faces of women, all the rouged lips and kohl-blackened eyelids... all of that has created around me an atmosphere of trance and mortal agony. Cosmetics: there is the root cause of my illness! But I am happy, now, when there are only masks! Sometimes, I detect the cadavers beneath, and remember that beneath the masks there is a host of spectres.

How fragile the craving, he thought, and how delicate it was. How easy it would be to snap it between his fingers, to crush it between his palms. How effortlessly the wanting turned into the franticness of taking, and how very, very easy it was to take.

The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.

Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.

It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.

to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.

Yes," he said - he would have said it to anything, she could have suggested a mutiny and he'd have searched tirelessly for an axe, a pitchfork, Excalibur itself - and she smiled up at him, lifting her chin to permit him full view of her approval. The prospect of it, of anything, buzzed in his veins.

Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been.

Math is a difficult thing to love, he said. It’s precise and unforgiving, it’s evasive and it will never love me back, but I don’t have much of a choice, do I? It’s the thing that I can do that other people can’t, or that other people lack the patience for. Are there worthier things, more rewarding things? Yes, probably. But I don’t know what they are, they never showed themselves to me. Only math did.

It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn't stop when she met his eye. Though, he reminded himself, maybe if he committed it to memory then he could return to it in another shape, with better understanding.

Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.

They have plenty of other times for conversations, he says, and that is when she knows- god, she knows- that she loves him so deeply and so passionately and so devastatingly that by the time that she tells him, the words will inevitably feel empty and small

He didn't see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that the could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship whit time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.

The world loved to take a beautiful woman and exclaim at the charm of her imperfection. (p. 26)

It isn’t constancy that keeps us alive, it’s the progression we use to move us. Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.

His name is written on my skin, he scarred me, I've changed my entire shape for having fit within the enormity of his thoughts, and now the only words I know are lines and color

They see you closer than you are, but you’re further from reach than either you or they can imagine.

If I’d known I would meet Charlotte Regan in the morning, maybe I would have gotten some fucking sleep.

That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spider palms, and still feel empty-handed.

People thought addiction was a craving, but the difference was this: Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.

That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat

Sometimes,” she said, “when I’m with someone else, I get this feeling like I’m asleep.

That’s a cycle,” he said, “not a circle,” but he understood what she meant.

that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.

One day,” he sighed, “you’ll discover that my understanding of math does not translate to a grasp of human behavior, and then it will occur to you that I am, in fact, an idiot.

if I let you in, I will not let you go. She exhaled, understanding.

They both paused, sipping from their respective thoughts. “I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.

Too many people had refused when she had wished that they would beg her to stay, and now, because of them, she had let him go so easily, unclenching all her fingers at once.

If she were to paint him, she thought, nobody would even believe her.

That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don’t go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun. Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.

Something is wrong, she thought, something is right. Something is definitely wrong but the something right is bigger, somehow, closer to truth. Wrong the way truth is when it’s right.

It isn't pretty, he wanted to say, it's lonely, it's desolate, it's a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It's the human condition! It's the entire universe itself! It's the depths of spacetime you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fucking dare you stand there and fail to weep? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time? Pretty, that's what you think this is? You think that's all she's capable of? You fool, she's done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to filly focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn't, its Truth. She told the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitilessly. So carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of, Oh, this is pretty.

Yes it does, he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with. These are distinct, doesn’t she realize? Does she have any idea how difficult he finds it to exist with other people? And then here she is, this mystery, this puzzle, does she even know how much he loves her unpredictability, her twists and turns? She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems.

She wanted to tell him, to teach him: every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape, but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones. He smiled at her like: isn’t it great? Yes, she thought, pained. Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

The dark tips of her nails traveled the shape of his upper lip, curving with it, and in another version of this precise moment, he said, Regan, come closer, let's see what happens, let's see how the stars shine on your skin

She knows better than to confuse apologies with affection. People are always sorry, so when he crawls towards her on the mattress she knows to wait for it, to sigh and say, It’s fine, only instead he surprises her, says: I love your brain.

These keys of mine,” she said. “If you could have one of them.” It was an implied question: If you could open only one part of me for your consumption, for your delectation, for the whims of your carnivorous mind, which part would you wish to see?

Chaos and ancient Night, I come no spy, With purpose to explore or to disturb The secrets of your realm, but by constraint Wand'Ring this darksome desert, as my way Lies through your spacious empire up to light, Alone, and without guide, half lost, I seek What readiest path leads where your gloomy bounds Confine with Heav'n; or if som other place From your Dominion won, th' Ethereal King Possesses lately, thither to arrive I travel this profound, direct my course; Directed no mean recompence it brings To your behoof, if I that Region lost, All usurpation then expelled, reduce To her original darkness and your sway (Which is my present journey) and once more Erect the Standard there of ancient Night; Yours be th' advantage all, mine the revenge. 970-987

He had those eyes, Regan supposed, and that mouth, and for better or worse, he had all the strangeness that fell out of it. Part of Regan irrationally resented the girl for not knowing that Aldo Damiani was closest to handsome when he was talking about bees.

The thing about women and clothes was, in Regan’s mind, that nothing was ever a permanent expression; it wasn’t any sort of commitment to being this type of girl or that one, but purely today, I am. It was just whichever version of herself she wanted to project for the time being.

I think,” he said, “that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.” “A whole set of them?” “Oh, almost definitely,” he replied. “I think that, for someone to get close to you, you must have to give them one key at a time. And even then, only one level can be opened at once.

Yes, a friend.” You and me, you and me, you and me, Aldo, Aldo, Rinaldo, I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice. The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.

Sometimes, if the two old women were not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at a very advanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with himself, peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the ether, moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his heart to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At such moments, while he offered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer their perfume, illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he poured himself out in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not have told himself, probably, what was passing in his spirit; he felt something take its flight from him, and something descend into him. Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with the abysses of the universe!

When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but it isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love and labour of people who may since have died. The wine is still changing, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God. Do you drink it alone? Never. The better a bottle, the more you want to share it with others ... and that is the other incredible thing about wine, that it brings people together, makes them share with one another, laugh with one another, fall in love with one another and with the world around them.

Above him were stars. Beneath him was grass. There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it. She seemed to appreciate things she could see.

Do you prefer ignorance?" "I should, probably," she admitted. "Ignorance really does seem to be bliss." That, however, he did seem to take issue with. "I think I'd rather be informed than blissful." "So you'd rather have knowledge than happiness?" He thought about it. "Yes," he concluded, and then hesitated. 'Sometimes," he began slowly, "doesn't happiness seem...fake? Like it might be something someone invented. An impossible goal we'll never reach," he clarified, "just to keep us all quiet." "Almost certainly," she agreed.

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.

Dad?” “You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.

people want to be romantic about everything, they want to give names to the stars, they want to tell stories

That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.

She could pry apart his ribs and leave him there, gutted, doe eyes wide with I didn’t think it’d be so wet.

How was he feeling? He had been bad before. He would be bad again. It would cycle and fluctuate the same way the weather would. It would rain in two weeks he thought.

How was he feeling? He had been bad before. He would be bad again. It would cycle and fluctuate the same way the weather would. It would rain in two weeks, he thought.

Tell your mind to be kind to you today (p. 11)

Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. (p. 3)

Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. (p. 32)

If you want to identify an emotion, or a sensation, then there is nothing more precise than art. (p.60)

I'll just stay until the universe tells me to leave. (p.70)

The prayer ended. He didn't let go. (p.82)

His sweetness was always moderately bitter. His candor was never without some bite. (p. 100)

Don't go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun. Don't go, don't go, don't go. (p. 105)

L'appel du vide, the call of the void. (p. 106)

Sometimes it's like I'm there, but not really. Not fully. Like part of me is going to wake up a century later and everything will just be totally unidentifiable. (p. 110)

You wanted more from me than I am even worth. (p. 137)

Her hands wander, when they express their disinterest in being empty, when they fill themselves with him. (p. 169)

he felt certain, smelled permanent, sounded firm.

I think I’d rather be informed than blissful.” “So you’d rather have knowledge than happiness?” He thought about it. “Yes,” he concluded, and then hesitated. “Sometimes,” he began slowly, “doesn’t happiness seem … fake? Like it might be something someone invented. An impossible goal we’ll never reach,” he clarified, “just to keep us all quiet.” “Almost certainly,” she agreed.

Tell the voice in your head to be quiet, would you? I know you’re not here right now, I know you’re lost somewhere that I can’t go or touch or see, but look me in my green eyes and tell me what else matters. Bees, Regan, think of the bees, think about the implausibility of time and space, think of impossible things. Think about the stars in Babylon and tell me, Regan, all this time we’ve been talking and you’ve been syncopating your breath to mine and your pulse to mine and your thoughts to my thoughts, you’ve been learning how to love me, haven’t you? If I am a lover of impossible problems then you will have loved me for my impossibilities, so tell me, Regan, what else matters but this, me, us? Nothing. Nothing. Welcome back, Regan. I missed you while you were away.

The mystery of this courage of Bauer’s is Hegel’s Phenomenology. As Hegel here puts self-consciousness in the place of man, the most varied human reality appears only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness. But a mere determination of self-consciousness is a “pure category,” a mere “thought” which I can consequently also abolish in “pure” thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel’s Phenomenology the material, perceptible, objective bases of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are left as they are. Thus the whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously real world, by merely transforming it into a “thing of thought” a mere determination of self-consciousness and can therefore dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the “ether of pure thought.” Phenomenology is therefore quite logical when in the end it replaces human reality by “Absolute Knowledge”—Knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, because self-consciousness is considered as the only mode of existence of man; absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows itself alone and is no more disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, man living in a real objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore dissolve in the head all the limitations which naturally remain in existence for evil sensuousness, for real man. Besides, everything which betrays the limitations of general self-consciousness—all sensuousness, reality, individuality of men and of their world—necessarily rates for him as a limit. The whole of Phenomenology is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality.

The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically —and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing the senses in human odors. To become utterly human, the compassionate fiend incarnate, the locksmith of the great door leading beyond and away and forever isolate. Men founder like ships. Children also. There are children who settle to the bottom at the age of nine, carrying with them the secret of their betrayal. There are perfidious monsters who look at you with the bland, innocent eyes of youth; their crimes are unregistered, because we have no names for them.

Green in the light of an armory. Green against the backdrop of a church. Green over drinks, over cake, over trivialities. Green in his reflection, staring back at her, his fingers penitently wrapped around her calf.

Regan”— Charlotte, he reminded himself too late, but dismissed it as a foregone error—“isn’t just difficult, she’s convoluted. She’s contradictory—honest even when she lies,” he offered as an example, “and rarely the same version twice. She’s confounding, really intricate. Infinite.” That was the word, he thought, clinging to it once he found it. “She’d have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do.

I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon. Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all. These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon.

Will it be worth it, just for his hands on your skin? Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you're the kind of person people leave? (p. 127)

It is only when we are truly alone without someone else to lean on; left with our own inner solitude that we can undergo a real process of change. The introspection that is needed to bring out the light that has dwindled down to ash and reignite the fire of our being. So let the darkness shape you, let it reform you, let it cradle you and birth you into a new life; a new way of being. Let the spark flame again, in the darkness is where you will find it.

It is only when we are truly alone without someone else to lean on; left with our own inner solitude that we can undergo a real process of change. The introspection that is needed to bring out the light that has dwindled down to ash and reignite the fire of our being. So let the darkness shape you, let it reform you, let it cradle you and birth you into a new life; a new way of being. Let the spark flame again, in the darkness is where you will find it.

Above him were stars. Beneath him was grass. There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it. She seemed to appreciate things she could see. He thought of her gaze traveling over the scars on his shoulders, taking him in. Yes, he would draw it for her, and then she would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he’d said it in a way she could understand, and then she would know that even this, with its ordinary features, was wonder and glory, too. He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.

Trust me when I say that everything you've ever felt has been experienced by another human being before you. You may not think so, but its true. That is what poetry is. It exists to remind us of this very fact. Poetry is mankind's way of saying that we are not entirely alone in the world; it offers a voice of comfort to resonate down through the ages like a lone foghorn's mournful call in the nautical night. Poetry is a stepladder between the centuries, from ancient Greece to tomorrow afternoon. Your problem is you just haven't been introduced to the pure poets - those who hit the head and the heart. The masters. But luckily for you, you have pitched at the right place. I'd say it is almost as if it were fate, if I could bring myself to believe in such an ethereal concept.

I consider it an error in scientific communication that, most of the time, merely the polished and flawless results of natural research are displayed, as in an art show. And exhibit of the finished product alone has many drawbacks and dangers for both its creator and its users. The creator of the product will be only too ready to demonstrate perfection and flawlessness while concealing gaps, uncertainties and discordant contradictions of his insight into nature. He thus belittles the meaning of the real process of natural research. The user of the product will not appreciate the rigorous demands made on the natural scientist when the latter has to reveal and describe the secrets of nature in a practical way. He will never learn to think for himself and to cope by himself. Very few drivers have an accurate idea of the sum of human efforts, of the complicated thought processes and operations needed for manufacturing an automobile. Our world would be better off is the beneficiaries of work knew more about the process of work and the existence of the workers, if they did not pluck so thoughtlessly the fruits of labor performed by others.

She was colossal like this, the enormity of what she was now steadily irrepressible, ebullient for being in his arms; Kiss me again, please, don’t stop, oh god don’t stop. He would never, he wouldn’t, but still, please don’t, we’ll shrink down to human-sized when we’re done but for now, stay like this with me; see the magnitude of being, see existence through my eyes; don’t blink or you might miss it. I am dwarfed, Aldo, by the happiness in that room, it’s overwhelmed me. It has made me feel so infinitesimally small; I need you to help me remember what it feels like to be vast again.

Shevek wandered across acres of polished marble under that immense ethereal vault, and came at last to the long array of doors through which crowds of people came and went constantly, all purposeful, all separate. They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain sameness, and he felt very much alone among them. In escaping his guides and guards he had not considered what it might be like to be on one’s own in a society where men did not trust one another, where the basic moral assumption was not mutual aid, but mutual aggression. He was a little frightened.

Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.

Mine, said the stone, mine is the hour. I crush the scissors, such is my power. Stronger than wishes, my power, alone. Mine, said the paper, mine are the words that smother the stone with imagined birds, reams of them, flown from the mind of the shaper. Mine, said the scissors, mine all the knives gashing through paper’s ethereal lives; nothing’s so proper as tattering wishes. As stone crushes scissors, as paper snuffs stone and scissors cut paper, all end alone. So heap up your paper and scissor your wishes and uproot the stone from the top of the hill. They all end alone as you will, you will.

Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been. Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.

Regan’s consistent unreachability was once a carefully honed practice that had gradually become a habit. When Regan was younger, she had coveted the prospect of a call or a text; it meant, primarily, attention. It meant that she had filled the vacancy of someone else’s thoughts. Then, after a while, she began to understand that there was power in devaluing her worth to others. She started to place limits on herself; she wouldn’t check her phone for ten minutes. Then for twenty. Eventually she’d space hours between, making a point to direct her thoughts elsewhere. If others were forced to wait for her time, she thought, then she would not have to owe so much of herself to them. Now, Regan is so very talented at being completely unreliable that people have

You are not in love with Rinaldo Damiani whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun, you do not even know him, he doesn’t know you. You can rest your hands on the scars of his shoulders and long to rid him of every breath of pain and still, you will not be in love with him, because this isn’t love. Love is a home and a mortgage and the promise of permanence; love is measured and paced, and this, the too-hasty sprint of your pulse, that’s drugs. You know drugs, don’t you, Charlotte? Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest. His hands on you, that can be preserved, it can be painted, it can be committed to the canvas of your imagination, and it can stay in the vaults of your private longings, your little reveries, your twisted dreams.

Will it be worth it, just for his hands on your skin? Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you're the kind of person people leave? Maybe it will, because look at his mouth, look at the shape if makes when his eyes are on you. You wouldn't make love with him, you'd make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. (p. 127)

we map things, he said, and chart things, observing and modeling and predicting, because we have no other choice, and this is the language we have agreed, collectively, to use. Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.

The English word Atonement comes from the ancient Hebrew word kaphar, which means to cover. When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and discovered their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, God sent Jesus to make coats of skins to cover them. Coats of skins don’t grow on trees. They had to be made from an animal, which meant an animal had to be killed. Perhaps that was the very first animal sacrifice. Because of that sacrifice, Adam and Eve were covered physically. In the same way, through Jesus’ sacrifice we are also covered emotionally and spiritually. When Adam and Eve left the garden, the only things they could take to remind them of Eden were the coats of skins. The one physical thing we take with us out of the temple to remind us of that heavenly place is a similar covering. The garment reminds us of our covenants, protects us, and even promotes modesty. However, it is also a powerful and personal symbol of the Atonement—a continuous reminder both night and day that because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we are covered. (I am indebted to Guinevere Woolstenhulme, a religion teacher at BYU, for insights about kaphar.) Jesus covers us (see Alma 7) when we feel worthless and inadequate. Christ referred to himself as “Alpha and Omega” (3 Nephi 9:18). Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Christ is surely the beginning and the end. Those who study statistics learn that the letter alpha is used to represent the level of significance in a research study. Jesus is also the one who gives value and significance to everything. Robert L. Millet writes, “In a world that offers flimsy and fleeting remedies for mortal despair, Jesus comes to us in our moments of need with a ‘more excellent hope’ (Ether 12:32)” (Grace Works, 62). Jesus covers us when we feel lost and discouraged. Christ referred to Himself as the “light” (3 Nephi 18:16). He doesn’t always clear the path, but He does illuminate it. Along with being the light, He also lightens our loads. “For my yoke is easy,” He said, “and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). He doesn’t always take burdens away from us, but He strengthens us for the task of carrying them and promises they will be for our good. Jesus covers us when we feel abused and hurt. Joseph Smith taught that because Christ met the demands of justice, all injustices will be made right for the faithful in the eternal scheme of things (see Teachings, 296). Marie K. Hafen has said, “The gospel of Jesus Christ was not given us to prevent our pain. The gospel was given us to heal our pain” (“Eve Heard All These Things,” 27). Jesus covers us when we feel defenseless and abandoned. Christ referred to Himself as our “advocate” (D&C 29:5): one who believes in us and stands up to defend us. We read, “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler” (Psalm 18:2). A buckler is a shield used to divert blows. Jesus doesn’t always protect us from unpleasant consequences of illness or the choices of others, since they are all part of what we are here on earth to experience. However, He does shield us from fear in those dark times and delivers us from having to face those difficulties alone. … We’ve already learned that the Hebrew word that is translated into English as Atonement means “to cover.” In Arabic or Aramaic, the verb meaning to atone is kafat, which means “to embrace.” Not only can we be covered, helped, and comforted by the Savior, but we can be “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love” (2 Nephi 1:15). We can be “clasped in the arms of Jesus” (Mormon 5:11). In our day the Savior has said, “Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in the arms of my love” (D&C 6:20). (Brad Wilcox, The Continuous Atonement, pp. 47-49, 60).

I went to the window, opening the pierced shutters to look out over the sleeping city. The moon was waxing and hung half-full like some exotic silver jewel just over the horizon. From the courtyard below rose the scent of jasmine on the cool night air. A slender vine had wound its way up to the balcony, and I reached out, pinching off a single creamy white blossom. I lifted it to my nose, drinking in the thick sweetness of it as it filled my head, sending my senses reeling. There was something narcotic about that jasmine, something carnal and ethereal at the same time. I crushed the petals between my fingers, taking the scent onto my skin. It was not a fragrance to wear alone. It was too rich, too heady, too full of sensuality and promise. It was a fragrance for silken cushions and damp naked flesh and moonlit beds. I rubbed at my fingers, but the scent clung tightly, keeping me company as I sat in the window, listening to a song I had almost forgot and thinking of Gabriel Starke and the five years that stretched barrenly between us.

Next above the Plane of Ethereal Substance comes the Plane of Energy (A), which comprises the ordinary forms of Energy known to science, its seven sub-planes being, respectively, Heat; Light; Magnetism; Electricity, and Attraction (including Gravitation, Cohesion, Chemical Affinity, etc.) and several other forms of energy indicated by scientific experiments but not as yet named or classified. The Plane of Energy (B) comprises seven sub-planes of higher forms of energy not as yet discovered by science, but which have been called "Nature's Finer Forces" and which are called into operation in manifestations of certain forms of mental phenomena, and by which such phenomena becomes possible. The Plane of Energy (C) comprises seven sub-planes of energy so highly organized that it bears many of the characteristics of "life," but which is not recognized by the minds of men on the ordinary plane of development, being available for the use on beings of the Spiritual Plane alone — such energy is unthinkable to ordinary man, and may be considered almost as "the divine power." The beings employing the same are as "gods" compared even to the highest human types known to us.

It isn’t pretty, he wanted to say, it’s lonely, it’s desolate, it’s a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It’s the human condition! It’s the entire universe itself! It’s the depths of spacetime you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fucking dare you stand there and fail to weep? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time? Pretty, that’s what you think this is? You think that’s all she’s capable of? You fool, she’s done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn’t, it’s Truth. She told the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitilessly. So carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of, Oh, this is pretty.

The fall of dusk upon the Egyptian scene is an unforgettable event, an event of unearthly beauty. Everything is transformed in colour and the most vivid contrasts come into being between sky and earth. I sat alone on the yielding yellow sand before the stately, regal figure of the crouching Sphinx, a little to one side, watching with fascinated eyes the wonderful play of ethereal colours which swiftly appear and as swiftly pass when the dying sun no longer covers Egypt with golden glory. For who can receive the sacred message which is given him by the beautiful, mysterious afterglow of an African sunset, without being taken into a temporary paradise? So long as men are not entirely coarse and spiritually dead, so long will they continue to love the Father of Life, the sun, which makes these things possible by its unique sorceries. They were not fools, those ancients, who revered Ra, the great light, and took it into their hearts as god.

XVIII TO HIS LADY                Beloved beauty who inspires             love from afar, your face concealed             except when your celestial image             stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields         5  where light and nature’s laughter             shine more lovely;             was it maybe you who blessed             the innocent age called golden,             and do you now, blithe spirit,       10  soar among men? Or does the miser, fate,             who hides you from us save you for the future?                No hope of seeing you alive             remains for me now,             except when, naked and alone,       15  my soul will go down a new street             to an unfamiliar home. Already, at the dawning             of my dark, uncertain day,             I imagined you a fellow traveler             on this parched ground. But no thing on earth       20  compares with you; and if someone             who had a face like yours resembled you             in word and deed, still she would be less lovely.                In spite of all the suffering             that fate assigned to human life,       25  if there was anyone on earth             who truly loved you as my thought portrays you,             this life for him would be a joy.             And I see clearly how your love             would still inspire me to seek praise and virtue,       30  the way I used to in my early years.             Though heaven gave no comfort for our suffering,             still mortal life with you would be             like what in heaven becomes divinity.                In the valleys, where you hear       35  the weary farmer singing             and I sit and mourn             my youth’s illusions leaving me;             and on the hills where I turn back             and lament my lost desires,       40  my life’s lost hope, I think of you             and start to shake. In this sad age             and sickly atmosphere, I try             to keep your noble look in mind;             without the real thing, I enjoy the image.       45     Whether you are the one and only             eternal idea that eternal wisdom             disdains to see arrayed in sensible form,             to know the pains of mournful life             in transitory dress;       50  or if in the supernal spheres another earth             from among unnumbered worlds receives you,             and a near star lovelier than the Sun             warms you and you breathe benigner ether,             from here, where years are both ill-starred and brief,       55  accept this hymn from your unnoticed lover.

But sleep tha pondereth and is not to be and there oh may my weary spirit dwell apart forms heaven's eternity and yet how far from hell. other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before the bird said nevermore. leave my loneliness unbroken. how dark a woe yet how sublimes a hope. And the fever called living is conquered at last. I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore and i hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep while i weep while i weep o god can i not grasp them with a tighter clasp o god can i not save one from the pitiless wave is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream. Hell rising form a thousand thrones shall do it reverence. It was the dead who groaned within lest the dead who is forsaken may not be happy now. even for thy woes i love thee even for thy woes thy beauty and thy woes think of all that is airy and fairy like and all that is hideous and unwieldy. hast thou not dragged Diana from her car. I care not though it perishes with a thought i then did cherish. For on its wing was dark alley and as it fluttered fell an essence powerful to destroy a soul that knew it well. (Talking about death) the intense reply of hers to our intelligence. Then all motion of whatever nature creates most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought at the true purposes seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable at the cautions selection and rejections at the painful erasures and interpolations in a word at the wheels and pinions the tackle for scene shifting the steep ladders and demon traps the cock[s feathers a the red pain and the black patches which in ninety nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histiro. Wit the Arabians there is a medium between heaven and hell where men suffer no punishment but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they supposed to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. If i could dwell where israfel hath dwelt and he where i he might not sing so wildly well mortal melody, while a bolder note than this might swell form my lyre within the sky. And i am drunk with love of the dead who is my bride. And so being young and dipt in folly , I feel in love with melancholy. I could not love except where death was mingling his with beauty's breath or hymen, Time, and destiny were stalking between her and me. Yet that terror was not friegt but a tremulous delight a feeling not the jeweled mine could teach or bribe me to define nor love although the love were thine. Whose solitary soul could make an Eden of that dim lake. that my young life were a lasting dream my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow. An idle longing night and day to dream my very life away. As others saw i could not bring my passions from a comman spring from the sam source i have not taken my sorrow and all i loved i loved alone La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude estune belle chose impulse upon the ether the source of all motion is thought and the source of all thought. Be of heart and fear nothing your allotted days of stupor have expired and tomorrow i will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence. unknown now known of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.