Resignation Sad Quotes

It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

(Ren's) eyes were sad but resigned. “And where will you go?” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my reply. “I don’t know.” “Please don’t do this,” he whispered. “Come back with me. We’ll talk to Logan; there has to be an explanation. The Keepers need us; we’re the alphas. We’ll figure this out. They won’t hurt you. I won’t let them.

Quince...why didn't you ever tell her? This girl you love. Why didn't you tell her how you feel?"..."Because"- his voice is heavy with a kind of resigned sadness-"She doesn't want to know." Lily & Quince pg.223

So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had foreseen – an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike. Yet it was fitting: it had the sublime inevitability of a great work of art. Jan had glimpsed the universe in all its immensity, and knew now that it was no place for man. He realized at last how vain, in the ultimate analysis, had been the dream that lured him to the stars. For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.

My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.

Still, there was a bored sadness to her. And a resignation I’d seen on faces my whole life—people giving up, crossing over to that place without struggle—and I wanted to alter that.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts.

Her eyes were misting over, her heart was talking on her lips. To need everything when everything is finished. She no longer knew whether she was sad or whether it was hunger. To live like that, head bent forward, chin resting down near her breasts, without muscles, without sinews, without vertebrae. She smiled a martyr's smile for her own benefit: for her wretchedness was also a tenderness, and resignation is not the same as oblivion.

Justine shook her head mournfully. "I do not fear to die," she said; "that pang is past. God raises my weakness and gives me courage to endure the worst. I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me. Learn from me, dear lady, to submit in patience to the will of heaven!

Life sometimes offers you a chance, he thought, but when you are too cowardly or too indecisive to seize it life takes the cards away; there is a moment for doing things and entering a possible happiness, and this moment lasts a few days, sometimes a few weeks or even a few months, but it happens once and one time only, and if you want to return to it later it's quite simply impossible. There's no more place for enthusiasm, belief, and faith, and there remains just gentle resignation, a sad and reciprocal pity, the useless but correct sensation that something could have happened, that you just simply showed yourself unworthy of this gift you had been offered.

But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

the trackers, an even more pathetic collection of tatterdemalions than our porters of the morning, began to attach themselves resignedly to the lines. They had such sad faces!

There comes a day in every man's life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back. Because of my father's circumstances, I had a sad commentary on life, but I now understood that he was offering me his own gift, one that only time can provide. He was offering me the gift of perspective. My father was telling me that while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history---Armstrong's walk on the moon, Nixon's resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake---we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars, but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word. Their first day of school. And when our children grow, we remember those moments with a touch of melancholy: the day they get their driver's license, the day we drive them to college, the day they marry, and the day they have their children. And the cycle begins anew. We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make our lives extraordinary.

Olga was nice, Olga was nice and loving, Olga loved him, he repeated to himself with a growing sadness as he also realised that nothing would ever happen between them again, life sometimes offers you a chance he thought, but when you are too cowardly or too indecisive to seize it life takes the cards away; there is a moment for doing things and entering a possible happiness, and this moment lasts a few days, a few weeks or even a few months, but it only happens once and one time only, and if you want to return to it later it's quite simply impossible. There's no more place for enthusiasm, belief and faith, and there remains just gentle resignation, a sad and reciprocal pity, the useless but correct sensation that something could have happened, that you just simply showed yourself unworthy of this gift you had been offered.

Wilhelm’s smile reminded Harry of his father’s sad, resigned smile, the smile of a man looking backwards because that’s where the things that made him smile were.

I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me.

Sorry I overheard that, but I'm glad he's staying," Luke's sister said. "Not just because he'll be near me but because it gives him a chance to get over you." Jocelyn sounded defensive. "Amatis-" "It's been a long time, Jocelyn," Amatis said. "If you don't love him, you ought to let him go." Jocelyn was silent. Clary wished she could see her mother's expression- did she looked sad? Angry? Resigned? Amatis gave a little gasp. "Unless- you do love him?" "Amatis, I can't-" "You do! you do!" There was a sharp sound, as if Amatis had clapped her hands together. "I knew you did! I always knew it!" "It doesn't matter." Jocelyn sounded tired. "It wouldn't be fair to Luke." "I don't want to hear it." There was a rustling noise, and Jocelyn made a sound of protest. Clary wondered if Amatis had actually grabbed hold of her mother. "If you love him, you go right now and tell him. Right now, before he goes to the Council." "But they want him to be their Council member! And he wants to-" "All Lucian wants," said Amatis firmly, "is you. You and Clary. That's all he ever wanted. Now go." Before Clary had a chance to move, Jocelyn dashed out into the hallway. She headed toward the door- and saw Clary, flattened against the wall. Halting, she opened her mouth in surprise. "Clary!" She sounded as if she were trying to make her voice bright and cheerful, and failed miserably. "I didn't realize you were here." Clary stepped away from the wall, grabbed hold of the doorknob, and threw the door wide open. Bright sunlight poured into the hall. Jocelyn stood blinking in the harsh illumination, her eyes on her daughter. "If you don't go after Luke," Clary said, enunciating very clearly, "I, personally, will kill you." For a moment Jocelyn looked astonished. Then she smiled. "Well," she said, "if you put it like that." A moment later she was out of the house, hurrying down the canal path toward the Accords Hall. Clary shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Amatis, emerging from the living room, darted past her to lean on the window sill, glancing aniously out through the pane. "Do you think she'll catch him before he gets to the Hall?" "My mom's spent her whole life chasing me around," Clary said. "She moves fast.

You don’t want to flirt with me, Mia.” “Because you don’t want a whore?” She sounded so sad, resigned. “Because you don’t want me,” he corrected gently. “Old and busted, that’s what I am.

Lidewij, I believe Agustus Waters sent a few pages from a notebok to Peter Van Houten shortly before he (Augustus) died. It is very important to me that someone reads these pages. I want to read them, of course, but maybe they weren't written for me. Regardless, they must be read. They must be. Can you help? Your friend, Hazel Grace Lancaster "She responded late that afternoon." Dear Hazel, I did not know that Augustus had died. I am very sad to hear this news. He was such a very charismatic young man. I am so sorry, and so sad. I have not spoken to Peter since I resigned that day we met. It is very late at night here, but I am going over to his house first thing in the morning to find this letter and force him to read it. Mornings were his best time, usually. Your friend, Lidewij Vliegenthart p.s. I am bringing my boyfriend in case we have to physically retsrain Peter.

I do not fear to die, that pang is past. God raises my weakness, and gives me courage to endure the worst. I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me. Learn from me, dear lady, to submit in patience to the will of Heaven!"~~Justine Moritz

A distant warm look entered Major Danby's eyes. "It must be nice to live like a vegetable," he conceded wistfully. "It's lousy," answered Yossarian. "No, it must be very pleasant to be free from all this doubt and pressure," insisted Major Danby. "I think I'd like to live like a vegetable and make no important decisions." "What kind of vegetable, Danby?" "A cucumber or a carrot." "What kind of a cucumber? A good one or a bad one?" "Oh, a good one, of course." "They'd cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad." Major Danby's face fell. "A poor one, then." "They'd let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow." "I guess I don't want to live like a vegetable, then," said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation.

He sounded less sad than simply resigned. This was the way he had always expected the world to go; snatching joy out of his hands for the sheer sake of doing it, and not because he, personally, had done anything to earn the loss.

There is a moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity — pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain.

But I knew it wasn't just the cute girl on the screen that had made Eunice cry. It was her father laughing, being kind, the family momentarily loving and intact - a cruel side trip into the impossible, an alternate history. The dinner was over. The waiters were clearing the table with resignation and without a word. I knew that, according to tradition, I had to allow Dr. Park to pay for the meal, but I went into my apparat and transferred him three hundred yuan, the total of the bill, out of an unnamed account. I did not want his money. Even if my dreams were realised and I would marry Eunice someday, Dr. Park would always remain to me a stranger. After thirty-nine years of being alive, I had forgiven my own parents for not knowing how to care for a child, but that was the depth of my forgiveness.

I would like to hold your hand as it holds this green leaf, yellowed, that fell early from its tree, this Autumn. And I would like to imagine that it feels your careful care, for your eyes are warmed by your heart, and I would let you sadly nestle into me as a bird folds into its nest, resigning itself to a storm. For my heart is as large as a city, and it glows with the fire that, with the right mischievous love, shall serve to inspire thousands upon thousands to inspire thousands upon thousands.

Good God—don’t they teach you anything in those poor excuses for schools anymore?” Then he calms down, but only a little. “No, I suppose they wouldn’t. History is written by the victors—and when there are no victors, it all winds up in corporate shredders.” He looks out the window with the sad resignation of a man who knows he’s too old to change the world.

I think I finally resigned myself to it in that moment. Just how sad it all was. And then I started singing.

I didn't wake up with a gasp like in the movies, though that might've made me feel better. Instead I woke up with a sad resignation as the song continued its soft, solemn loop.

Sadly, in our technological, impersonal, and avaricious consumer society, people merely hold on to jobs. They put in their time, leave at the five o'clock bell, pick up their pay checks, and leave the whole business behind them. Work, for so many, becomes a necessary evil. They go at it grudgingly, at best resignedly. It is hard to fault them; the stressful conditions and uncertainty under which so many workers labor force them into an adversarial relationship with their occupations and employers.

People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists. “…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…” What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks. I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me. “The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.” “I know what you mean,” I said. His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.” “I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened. “I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

There were piles of tailings and chunks of concrete studded with rebar around the oil rig, which continued to bob its head up and down as if it knew the sad ways of the world, as if depressedly resigned to what was happening, as if saying: 'Of course. Of course.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; and it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

He spent long and charming hours reclining and having a tête-à-tête with himself, the only guest he had neglected to ask to supper in his lifetime. He tried to adorn his suffering body, to lean in resignation on the windowsill, gazing at the sea, a melancholy joy. With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful.

I'm no expert, but in my limited experience, women aren't born women. They start out as girls. And every girl, from the moment they can dream, imagines the rescue. The knight. The castle. Life in a fairy tale. If you don't believe me, watch boys and girls on a playground. No one teaches us to do this. The kid in us actually believes in things that are too good to be true. Before life convinces us we can't and they're not. Then life kicks in. Boys become men. Girls become women. For any number of reasons we are wounded and, sadly, wounded people wound people. So many of us grow into doubting, hopeless, callous adults protecting hardened hearts. Medicating the pain. Life isn't what we imagined. Nor are we. And we didn't start out trying to get there. Far from it. But it's who we've become. One day we turn around, and what we once dreamed or hoped is a distant echo. We've forgotten what it sounded like. Once pure and unadulterated, the voice of hope is now muted by all the stuff we've crammed on top of it. And we're okay with that. For some illogical reason, we stand atop the mine shaft of ourselves, shoving stuff into the pipe that is us, telling our very soul, 'Shut up. Not another word.' Why? Because the cry of our heart hurts when unanswered. And the longer it remains unanswered, the deeper the hurt. In self-protection we inhale resignation and exhale indifference. [Murphy Shepherd]

that I loved him. That I was in love with him. And getting high and going to Thailand and marrying a prince wasn’t going to make me stop. And him being married to somebody else…That wasn’t going to stop it either. I think I finally resigned myself to it in that moment. Just how sad it all was. And then I started singing.

I think I’d like to live like a vegetable and make no important decisions.” “What kind of vegetable, Danby?” “A cucumber or a carrot.” “What kind of cucumber? A good one or a bad one?” “Oh, a good one, of course.” “They’d cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad.” Major Danby’s face fell. “A poor one, then.” “They’d let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow.” “I guess I don’t want to live like a vegetable, then,” said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation.

You must be living life to its fullest, always. Even when you are suffering, you are learning important lessons. You are making memories. You are doing this for the experience, which is irreplaceable. Every day is a gift. You are not permitted to sigh deeply, or roll your eyes, or linger skeptically on the sidelines. You are not allowed a little space to be lukewarm, or resigned, or judgmental, or exhausted. Sadness is weak. If you’re feeling bad, you must be making bad choices. It’s time to make better ones.

And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over.

There was sadness in her eyes, a tired resignation.

That was the trouble now. People felt sad, so they got a pill. Work was hard, so people resigned. Marriages went through rocky patches and people got divorced. It was selfishness, pure and simple. And it was all justified by emotions. I’m unhappy. I’m stressed. I need to feel loved. Just having the emotion was enough justification for whatever people did. And it was useless. Didn’t people see that unhappiness came from within? A person could change jobs, but if they were an unhappy type then they would take their unhappiness with them.

You, and you alone, have reported this mysterious sense of doom. You, and you alone, are a chaos magnet the likes of which I have never seen. After our little shopping trip to Diagon Alley, and then the Sorting Hat, and then today's little episode, I can well foresee that I am fated to sit in the Headmaster's office and hear some hilarious tale about Professor Quirrell in which you and you alone play a starring role, after which there will be no choice but to fire him. I am already resigned to it, Mr. Potter. And if this sad event takes place any earlier than the Ides of May, I will string you up by the gates of Hogwarts with your own intestines and pour fire beetles into your nose. Now do you understand me completely?

That was when it was sad, when you lay awake at night and remembered things. That was when it was sad, when you stood by the bed and undressed, thinking, “When he kisses me, shivers run up my back. I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad. That has no meaning, absolutely none. Just words. But something about the darkness of the streets has a meaning.

Here’s what a lot of people don’t get: the opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness. If you’re angry or sad, that means you still give a fuck about something. That means something still matters. That means you still have hope. No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference. It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?

He began to cry then, clutching LB. The tears came easily. He had not cried tears of such distilled regret since his son had gone missing. LB was going limp, either spent, tired of fighting, or resigned to her fate. Luke hugged her so, so tight. He wanted LB to remember his touch. The warmth and love that radiated from his whole body, coupled with the sadness that she was being ripped away from him. He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.

I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Maimonides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night.

There was no memory of pain or fear, though. What the hive-queen felt was sadness, a sense of resignation. She had not thought these words as she saw the humans coming to kill, but it was in words that Ender understood her: The humans did not forgive us, she thought. We will surely die.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. VI.

The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.” I couldn’t agree more. Sadly, so few people ever come close to living the life of their dreams that the phrase itself has become cliché. Most people resign themselves to a life of mediocrity, passively accepting whatever life gives them.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

It represented a world I didn’t know, the opposite of where I was—and I hated where I was. I hated the poverty, the cigarette smoke, the drug use, the embarrassment, the loneliness. And Diana Ross was promising me that there was a world that wasn’t stained with sadness and resignation. Somewhere there was a world that was sensual and robotic and hypnotic. And clean.

Dutiful How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way? Going around as a child with a small broom and dustpan, sweeping up dirt I didn't make, or out into the yard with a stunted rake,, weeding the gardens of others -the dirt blew back, the weeds flourished, despite my efforts- and all the while with a frown of disapproval for other people's fecklessness, and my own slavery. I didn't perform these duties willingly. I wanted to be on the river, or dancing, but something had me by the back of the neck. That's me too, years later, a purple-eyed wreck, because whatever had to be finished wasn't, and I stayed late, grumpy as a snake, on too much coffee, and further on still, those groups composed of mutterings and scoldings, and the set-piece exhortation: somebody ought to do something! That was my hand shooting up. But I've resigned. I've ditched the grip of my echo. I've decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace adorned with the gold word NO, and eat flowers I didn't grow. Still, why do I feel so responsible for the wailing from shattered houses, for birth defects and unjust wars, and the soft, unbearable sadness filtering down from distant stars?

These are the creatures we usually fall in love with, only to suffer the more. For each new anxiety they cause us blots out from our eyes a part of their personality. We were resigned to suffering, thinking we loved something outside ourselves, and we come to realize that our love is a function of our sadness, that perhaps it is our sadness, and that its object is only to a small extent the young girl with raven hair.

I realized that a new phase of exile was beginning, that from now on there would be other periods, all different, each with its own anxieties, all shattering and overwhelming, and that I would be changing too, passing from one crisis to the next until I reached the moment of truth, unique and definitive — the day on which I would either stop being an exile and return home, or unavoidably, with sadness and resignation, become an immigrant.

My anger was boiling in my veins now. "What exactly is it you think you can fix?" He took my hands softly in his own. "You. Me. Us? I don't know Tink. Just please, let me try?" His eyebrows lifted expectantly. "There is no 'us' Trick." He closed his eyes slowly and when he opened them again they were filled with a resigned sadness. "There will always be an 'us' Tink. Always." He lifted my hand to his lips and placed a gentle kiss against my skin.

Everyone," Ross said, "seems a little less concerned than I do. Am I more tender-hearted for others or only tender because of my own conscience?" "We are not–untender," she said. "Not so. But maybe we are more–resigned. When a man is condemned to death we accept it, though it's sad to do so. We know we cannot change it. You hoped to change it–so it's more of a–a disappointment. You feel you have failed. We don't feel that because we never hoped to succeed.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry. But my mind quickly puts me in my place… I remember that I’m on the fourth floor of the Rua dos Douradores; I feel drowsy; I look at my unlovely hand resting on this half-written page and at the cheap cigarette in my left hand, hovering over the fraying blotter. Me in this fourth-floor room, interrogating life!, saying what souls feel!, writing prose like a genius or a famous author! Me, here, a genius! …

At the deathbed of Christianity. Really active people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvellously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that will in the end be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone to exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demand s elevated to godhead that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it is not so much 'God, freedom and immortality' that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition will prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity.

No, it must be very pleasant to be free from all this doubt and pressure,” insisted Major Danby. “I think I’d like to live like a vegetable and make no important decisions.” “What kind of vegetable, Danby?” “A cucumber or a carrot.” “What kind of cucumber? A good one or a bad one?” “Oh, a good one, of course.” “They’d cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad.” Major Danby’s face fell. “A poor one, then.” “They’d let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow.” “I guess I don’t want to live like a vegetable, then,” said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation.

With his child passed out on the couch, after arrests and drunk tanks and hospitalizations, Lynch, the undertaker and poet and essayist, looked at his dear addicted son with sad but lucid resignation, and he wrote: “I want to remember him the way he was, that bright and beaming boy with the blue eyes and the freckles in the photos, holding the walleye on his grandfather’s dock, or dressed in his first suit for his sister’s grade-school graduation, or sucking his thumb while drawing at the kitchen counter, or playing his first guitar, or posing with the brothers from down the block on his first day of school.

I've been fighting to defend who I am all my life. I'm tired. I just don't know how to go on anymore. This is the only way I can think of I can still be me and survive. I just don't know any other way". Theresa sat back in her chair. "I'm a woman, Jess. I love you because you're a woman, too. I made up my mind when I was growing up that I was not going to betray my desire by resigning to marrying a dirt farmer or the boy at the service station. Do you understand?" I shook my head sadly. "Do you wish I wasn't a butch?" She smiled. "No, I love your butchness. I just don't want to be some man's wife, even if that man's a woman.

It strikes me, Ernest said, that he has lost his objectivity. It's so caught in the latter of these events and feelings, that he totally identified with them. We need to find a way to help him detach a little. We need to help him see himself from a distance, even from a cosmic perspective. Your client has become one with his problems – he has lost the feeling of continuity of the self that lives these events, which constitute only a small glimpse of his existence. And what makes matters worse is his assumption that the current unhappiness is going to be permanent — always the same. Of course, that's a characteristic of depression – the combination of sadness and pessimism.

I like pirates, don’t you, Miss Drew? An’ robbers an’ things like that? Miss Drew, would you like to be married to a robber?” He was trying to reconcile his old beloved dream of his future estate with the new one of becoming Miss Drew’s husband. “No,” she said firmly. His heart sank. “Nor a pirate?” he said sadly. “No.” “They’re quite nice really – pirates,” he assured her. “I think not.” “Well,” he said resignedly, “we’ll jus’ have to go huntin’ wild animals and things. That’ll be all right.” “Who?” she said, bewildered. “Well – jus’ you wait,” he said darkly. Then: “Would you rather be married by the Archbishop of York or the Pope?” “The Archbishop, I think,” she said gravely. He nodded. “All right.

Depression, that is,” I continue. “People who’ve never experienced it think it’s a mask, but it’s not. It’s a curtain. And when it falls, it shuts you off from your life, plunging you into complete darkness. There you stand, arms flailing around you, reaching for anything to find your way back. But after exhausting yourself, grasping at only more darkness, you give up and drop to the floor in resignation. “And so you sit. You and the blackness. You and the accusations. You and the self-hatred, the lies that become truth, the failure and pain and hopelessness and black thoughts that twist through you, impaling you to the floor. There you bleed, alone in your black hole, convinced the audience on the other side of the curtain has given up and gone home. The show is over. “Before you know it, you realize the curtain has turned into a cement wall, and you couldn’t escape the darkness even if you wanted to, but by now you don’t care anymore. What’s the point? There’s nothing waiting for you on the other side, and even if there was, you’re such a useless waste of space that you wouldn’t dare to contaminate the world outside with your cancer anyway.” I stop, my eyes burning, my voice heavy in my throat. “You feel like crying all the time but you rarely do. Depression isn’t sadness; it’s numbness. You don’t have the energy for sadness. You can’t sleep. You don’t eat. You have no desire for the things you used to love, but it doesn’t matter because you can’t love anyway. You feel nothing, just a dull, heavy ache that makes it hard to breathe sometimes, let alone get up to start the search again. You fantasize about disappearing, just erasing your pointless existence and sparing the Earth from your toxic presence. By now you’re so exhausted just from the effort of living that there’s nothing left to live it.” I

Sad understanding is what compassion means - I resign from the attempt to be happy. It’s all discrimination anyway, you value this and devalue that and go up and down but if you were like the void you’d only stare into space and in that space though you’d see stiffnecked people in their favorite various displaytory and armors sniffing and miffed on benches of this one-same-ferry-boat to the other shore you’d still be staring into space for form is emptiness, and emptiness is form - O golden eternity, these simperers in your show of things, take them and slave them to your truth that is forever true forever - forgive me my human floppings - I think therefore I die - I think therefore I am born - Let me be void still - Like a happy child lost in a sudden dream and when his buddy addresses him he doesnt hear, his buddy nudges him he doesnt move; finally seeing the purity and truth of his trance the buddy watches in wonder - you can never be that pure again, and jump out of such trances with a happy gleam of love, being an angel in the dream.

Sad understanding is what compassion means - I resign from the attempt to be happy. It’s all discrimination anyway, you value this and devalue that and go up and down but if you were like the void you’d only stare into space and in that space though you’d see stiffnecked people in their favorite various displaytory furs and armors sniffing and miffed on benches of this one-same-ferry-boat to the other shore you’d still be staring into space for form is emptiness, and emptiness is form - O golden eternity, these simperers in your show of things, take them and slave them to your truth that is forever true forever - forgive me my human floppings - I think therefore I die - I think therefore I am born - Let me be void still - Like a happy child lost in a sudden dream and when his buddy addresses him he doesnt hear, his buddy nudges him he doesnt move; finally seeing the purity and truth of his trance the buddy watches in wonder - you can never be that pure again, and jump out of such trances with a happy gleam of love, being an angel in the dream

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. Chapter 6 — Hundreds of People The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the waves of four months had roiled over the trial for treason, and carried

HOW DO THEY RECEIVE ME? They call me “little girl,” “dear daughter,” “dear child.” Probably if I was of their generation they would behave differently with me. Calmly and as equals. Without joy and amazement, which are the gifts of the meeting between youth and age. It is a very important point, that then they were young and now, as they remember, they are old. They remember across their life—across forty years. They open their world to me cautiously, to spare me: “I got married right after the war. I hid behind my husband. Behind the humdrum, behind baby diapers. I wanted to hide. My mother also begged: ‘Be quiet! Be quiet! Don’t tell.’ I fulfilled my duty to the Motherland, but it makes me sad that I was there. That I know about it…And you are very young. I feel sorry for you…” I often see how they sit and listen to themselves. To the sound of their own soul. They check it against the words. After long years a person understands that this was life, but now it’s time to resign yourself and get ready to go. You don’t want to, and it’s too bad to vanish just like that. Casually. In passing. And when you look back you feel a wish not only to tell about your life, but also to fathom the mystery of life itself. To answer your own question: Why did all this happen to me? You gaze at everything with a parting and slightly sorrowful look…Almost from the other side…No longer any need to deceive anyone or yourself. It’s already clear to you that without the thought of death it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything. War is an all too intimate experience. And as boundless as human life… Once a woman (a pilot) refused to meet with me. She explained on the phone: “I can’t…I don’t want to remember. I spent three years at war…And for three years I didn’t feel myself a woman. My organism was dead. I had no periods, almost no woman’s desires. And I was beautiful…When my future husband proposed to me…that was already in Berlin, by the Reichstag…He said: ‘The war’s over. We’re still alive. We’re lucky. Let’s get married.’ I wanted to cry. To shout. To hit him! What do you mean, married? Now? In the midst of all this—married? In the midst of black soot and black bricks…Look at me…Look how I am! Begin by making me a woman: give me flowers, court me, say beautiful words. I want it so much! I wait for it! I almost hit him…I was about to…He had one cheek burned, purple, and I see: he understood everything, tears are running down that cheek. On the still-fresh scars…And I myself can’t believe I’m saying to him: ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’ “Forgive me…I can’t…” I understood her.

It wasn’t until she had almost reached its lights that she heard another rider in the hills behind her. Ice slid down Kestrel’s spine. Fear, that the rider was Arin. Fear, at her sudden hope that it was. She pulled Javelin to a stop and swung to the ground. Better to go on foot through the narrow streets to the harbor. Stealth was more important now than speed. Beating hooves echoed in the hills. Closer. She hugged Javelin hard around the neck, then pushed him away while she still could bear to do it. She slapped his rump in an order to head home. Whether he’d go to her villa or Arin’s, she couldn’t say. But he left, and might draw the other rider after him if she was indeed being pursued. She slipped into the city shadows. And it was magic. It was as if the Herrani gods had turned on their own people. No one noticed Kestrel skulking along walls or heard her cracking the thin ice of a puddle. No late-night wanderer looked in her face and saw a Valorian. No one saw the general’s daughter. Kestrel made it to the harbor, down to the docks. Where Arin waited. His breath heaved white clouds into the air. His hair was black with sweat. It hadn’t mattered that Kestrel had been ahead of him on the horse path. Arin had been able to run openly through the city while she had crept through alleys. Their eyes met, and Kestrel felt utterly defenseless. But she had a weapon. He didn’t, not that she could see. Her hand instinctively fell to her knife’s jagged edge. Arin saw. Kestrel wasn’t sure what came first: his quick hurt, so plain and sharp, or her certainty--equally plain, equally sharp--that she could never draw a weapon on him. He straightened from his runner’s crouch. His expression changed. Until it did, Kestrel hadn’t perceived the desperate set of his mouth. She hadn’t recognized the wordless plea until it was gone, and his face aged with something sad. Resigned. Arin glanced away. When he looked back it was as if Kestrel were part of the pier beneath her feet. A sail stitched to a ship. A black current of water. As if she were not there at all. He turned away, walked into the illuminated house of the new Herrani harbormaster, and shut the door behind him. For a moment Kestrel couldn’t move. Then she ran for a fishing boat docked far enough from its fellows that she might cast off from shore unnoticed by an sailors on the other vessels. She leaped onto the deck and took rapid stock of the boat. The tiny cabin was bare of supplies. As she lifted the anchor and uncoiled the rope tethering the boat to its dock, she knew, even if she couldn’t see, that Arin was talking with the harbormaster, distracting him while Kestrel prepared to set sail.

The pale amber spread, dilute with light, and beneath it lay the gray of the fog, and above it the dark blue of cloud—not of sky. The soul of it was so still, so resigned, so sad, so forsaken, that she who had thought her heart gone from her, suddenly felt its wells were filling, and soon they overflowed. She wept. At what? A colour in the sky! Was there then a God that knew sadness—and was that a banner of grief he hung forth to comfort the sorrowful with sympathy? Or was it but a godless colour which the heart varnished with its own grief? Or if the human heart came from nothing and was sad, why might not the aspects of nature come from nothing and be sad too—wrought in harmony with the unutterable woe of humanity? Then either is man the constructive centre of the world, and its meanings are but his own face looking back upon him from the mirror of his own projected atmosphere, and comfort there is none; or he is not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and colours the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man the one conscious point and object of a vast derision—insentient nature grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks and makes mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all, being at once that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but writhes in agony under the mockery.

Ordinarily, when he thought back upon those days, let alone upon his student years and the Bamboo Grove, it had always been as if he were gazing from a cool, dull room out into broad, brightly sunlit landscapes, into the irrevocable past, the paradise of memory. Such recollections had always been, even when they were free of sadness, a vision of things remote and different, separated from the prosaic present by a mysterious festiveness. But now, on this bright and cheerful September afternoon, with the strong greens and browns all around him and the ethereal, gently misted tones of blues verging into violet in the distance, as he trudged along at an easy pace, with frequent pauses to look about him, that walking tour of so long ago did not seem a distant paradise cut off from a resigned present. rather his present journey was the same as that of the past, the present Joseph Knecht was close as a brother to the Knecht of those days. Everything was new again, mysterious, promising; all that had been could recur, and many new things as well. It was long, long since he had looked out upon the day and the world and seen them as so unburdened, so beautiful and innocent. The happiness of freedom, of commanding his own destiny, flooded through him like a strong drink. How long it was since he had last had this feeling, last entertained this lovely and rapturous illusion.

We hear about the way middle-school teachers and such live, and it all seems terribly sad, but the only ones who really feel sad are the men themselves. That’s because modern-day people are fond of facts but they habitually throw out the sentiments that accompany the facts—which is all they can do, because society is pressing in on us so relentlessly we’re forced to throw them out. You can see this in the newspaper. Nine out of ten human interest stories are tragedies, but we have nothing to spare, nothing that enables us to feel them as tragedies. We read them only as factual reports. In the newspaper I take I often see the headline, ‘So-and-so Many Die,’ under which the name, address and cause of death of everyone who has died of unnatural causes that day is listed in small type, one line per person. It’s the ultimate in concision and lucidity. There’s also a column called ‘Burglaries at a Glance,’ in which all the burglaries are lumped together so that you can tell literally at a glance what kind of burglaries have been committed where—another great convenience. You have to realize that everything is like this. It’s the same with a resignation. To the man concerned, it might be an incident bordering on tragedy, but it’s important to face the fact that others don’t feel it with the same intensity. You would probably do well to keep this in mind when searching for work.

The Greater Washington area is now home to over sixteen hundred foundations of different kinds; the hordes of gunslinging grantsmen who try to maintain a façade of scholarly disinterest are functionally as much a part of the ecosystem of the town as the lobbyists on K Street. A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC) with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or he claimed — which, if true, is a sad commentary on the status of most elected officials), but also because he would no longer be limited to a senator's $174,000 statuatory annual salary. ¶ By the 1980s, the present Washington model of 'Beltwayland' was largely established. Contrary to widespread belief, Ronald Reagan did not revolutionize Washington; he merely consolidated and extended pre-existing trends. By the first term of his presidency, the place even had its first openly partisan daily newspaper, the Washington Times, whose every news item, feature, and op-ed was single-mindedly devoted to harping on some conservative bugaboo or other. The Times was the first shot in a later barrage of openly partisan media. Some old practices lingered on, to be sure: Congress retained at least an intermittent bipartisanship until Newt Gingrich's speakership ended it for all time.

Do you believe that?” Melinda says, directing her wonderment at Irv. “That if someone commits suicide they go to hell?” “No.” “But many Christians do, right?” “There’s a debate, but it’s doctrine.” “But you don’t think so?” “No.” “Why not?” “For the same reason the Catholics believe in the Trinity, Melinda.” The appetizers arrive with a speed that Sigrid finds suspicious. “Which is . . . what?” “It’s how I understand Jesus’s words spoken from the cross,” says Irv, taking a calamari. “Jesus spoke seven times on the cross. In Matthew Twenty-Seven, verse forty-six and in Mark Fifteen verse thirty-four he says, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ This led to the Trinity,” Irv said, sucking cocktail sauce and grease from his thumb. “The thinking is, if Jesus was Lord, who was he speaking to? He was obviously speaking to someone or something other than himself, unless . . . ya know.” Irv makes a circular cuckoo motion by his head with a piece of squid. “So perhaps he was speaking to the Father, or to the Holy Spirit. In this act, he distinguishes himself from the eternal and embodies everything that is Man. The fear, the sadness, the tragedy. The longing. The recognition of betrayal. We see him, in that moment, only as the Son, and because of that, as ourselves. As I read it, Melinda, we are not invited in that moment to be cruel to him for his despair, or to mock him. Instead we are asked to feel his pain. When Jesus says, ‘It is finished’ I don’t read, ‘Mission accomplished.’ I see a person resigned. A person who has lost hope. A person who has taken a step away from this life. And our pity for him grows. And finally he says, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Now, I’m not going to equate Jesus letting go with suicide, but any decent and forgiving Christian person would have to admit that we are looking at a person who cannot fight anymore. We are being taught to be understanding of that state of mind and sympathetic to the suffering that might lead a person to it. It does not follow to me that if someone succumbs to that grief we are to treat them with eternal contempt. I just don’t believe it.

Another dangerous neoliberal word circulating everywhere that is worth zooming in on is the word ‘resilience’. On the surface, I think many people won’t object to the idea that it is good and beneficial for us to be resilient to withstand the difficulties and challenges of life. As a person who lived through the atrocities of wars and sanctions in Iraq, I’ve learnt that life is not about being happy or sad, not about laughing or crying, leaving or staying. Life is about endurance. Since most feelings, moods, and states of being are fleeting, endurance, for me, is the common denominator that helps me go through the darkest and most beautiful moments of life knowing that they are fleeing. In that sense, I believe it is good for us to master the art of resilience and endurance. Yet, how should we think about the meaning of ‘resilience’ when used by ruling classes that push for wars and occupations, and that contribute to producing millions of deaths and refugees to profit from plundering the planet? What does it mean when these same warmongers fund humanitarian organizations asking them to go to war-torn countries to teach people the value of ‘resilience’? What happens to the meaning of ‘resilience’ when they create frighteningly precarious economic structures, uncertain employment, and lay off people without accountability? All this while also asking us to be ‘resilient’… As such, we must not let the word ‘resilience’ circulate or get planted in the heads of our youth uncritically. Instead, we should raise questions about what it really means. Does it mean the same thing for a poor young man or woman from Ghana, Ecuador, Afghanistan vs a privileged member from the upper management of a U.S. corporation? Resilience towards what? What is the root of the challenges for which we are expected to be resilient? Does our resilience solve the cause or the root of the problem or does it maintain the status quo while we wait for the next disaster? Are individuals always to blame if their resilience doesn’t yield any results, or should we equally examine the social contract and the entire structure in which individuals live that might be designed in such a way that one’s resilience may not prevail no matter how much perseverance and sacrifice one demonstrates? There is no doubt that resilience, according to its neoliberal corporate meaning, is used in a way that places the sole responsibility of failure on the shoulders of individuals rather than equally holding accountable the structure in which these individuals exist, and the precarious circumstances that require work and commitment way beyond individual capabilities and resources. I find it more effective not to simply aspire to be resilient, but to distinguish between situations in which individual resilience can do, and those for which the depth, awareness, and work of an entire community or society is needed for any real and sustainable change to occur. But none of this can happen if we don’t first agree upon what each of us mean when we say ‘resilience,’ and if we have different definitions of what it means, then we should ask: how shall we merge and reconcile our definitions of the word so that we complement not undermine what we do individually and collectively as people. Resilience should not become a synonym for surrender. It is great to be resilient when facing a flood or an earthquake, but that is not the same when having to endure wars and economic crises caused by the ruling class and warmongers. [From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]

He had given up, she thought, or he had died trying to reach her mother before she did, and in neither of those instances did she know how to find him, or how to be angry, or how to mourn. She went days and weeks without thinking of him at all, and on those occasions she did think of him, it was with an abstract sadness that transmuted disappointment, concern, and compromised love into a final resignation that as far as fathers were concerned, this—silence, mystery—was all life would have to offer her.

Cleaning up boundaries with parents and children. If you’ve been taking care of your parents, you can resign (unless they are truly unable to care for themselves; even so, caretaking can be assigned to someone else). Confront them. If they don’t get it, take care of yourself. You know better than I the devices your parents use to keep things as they are. Some parents respond to honest confrontation. Some are willing to accompany their children to therapy to fix the relationship, and some need to experience your unwillingness to continue in the old ways before they understand that you’re serious. Sadly, some parents are so afraid or so damaged by addictions or dysfunctional lives that they’ve lost the capacity for honesty. People of the Lie, by M. Scott Peck, describes the consequences of making choices against health and openness.

Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Once I got past grief, depression, and resignation, I needed help identifying other types of sad feelings. But unlike my exploration of anger, the thesaurus wasn’t much help this time. I added a few more words to the constellation, but I’m not sure how strongly I experience any of them. Sadness feels like a diffuse emotion, more of a background state of being than a tangible feeling. I’m rarely actively sad. I don’t burst into tears when I hear sad news. The last time I cried at a movie, I was 12. The only book that ever made me tear up was A Prayer for Owen Meany. More than once I’ve sat stoically immobile beside someone I love while they broke down. My sadness is all undercurrent, twisted up inside me, unable to escape to the surface. This, of course, makes me look cold and unfeeling. The stereotypical emotionless Aspie. The first time I confronted my muted sadness was in high school. A girl in my class, Karen, was killed in a car accident. The entire junior class attended her funeral, and everyone sobbed from beginning to end. Except me.

How they eat: Remember the last time you had dinner with your naturally skinny friend? “I’m starving!” she exclaimed, poring over the menu. For you: The (boring) garden salad, of course. Low-fat vinaigrette, on the side. For her: The spinach ravioli in lemon cream sauce. “How can you stand to eat that rabbit food?!” she asked incredulously, eyeing your plate. Which did look pretty sad next to her puffy pasta pillows of ricotta, swimming in creamy, lemon-y deliciousness. While you resigned yourself to your salad, she dove in. “This is so good!” she declared. And then a few minutes later, after just twelve bites, she did the unthinkable—she stopped eating. Because she was full.

I had never before been so tortured by the slowness of the Mexico City traffic; the irritability of the drivers; the savagery of the dilapidated trucks that ought to have been banned ages ago; the sadness of the begging mothers carrying children in their shawls and extending their calloused hands; the awfulness of the crippled and the blind asking for alms; the melancholy of the children in clown costumes trying to entertain with their painted faces and the little balls they juggled; the insolence and obscene bungling of the pot-bellied police officers leaning against their motorcycles at strategic highway entrances and exits to collect their bite-size bribes; the insolent pathways cleared for the powerful people in their bulletproof limousines; the desperate, self-absorbed, and absent gaze of old people unsteadily crossing side streets without looking where they were going, those white-haired, but-faced men and women resigned to die the same way as they lived; the giant billboards advertising an imaginary world of bras and underpants covering small swaths of perfect bodies with white skin and blonde hair, high-priced shops selling luxury and enchanted vacations in promised paradises.

It must be believed that Dona Placida still couldn't talk when she was born, but if she could have, she might have said to the authors of her days, "Here I am. Why did you call me?' And the sacristan and the sacristaness would naturally have answered her, 'We called you to burn your fingers on pots, your eyes in sewing, to eat poorly or not at all, to go from one place to another in drudgery, getting ill and recovering only to get ill and recover once again, sad now, then desperate, resigned tomorrow, but always with your hands on the pot and your eyes on the sewing until one day you end up in the mire or in the hospital. That's why we called you in a moment of sympathy.'’’ The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas- Machado de Asis

Grieving for their future, men and women often took their own lives. Others died when they could not maintain the feverish pace of the march. While the mortality rate of slaves during the Second Middle Passage never approached that of the transatlantic transfer, it surpassed the death rate of those who remained in the seaboard states. Over time some of the hazards of the long march abated, as slave traders - intent on the safe delivery of a valuable commodity - standardized their routes and relied more on flatboats, steamboats, and eventually railroads for transportation. The largest traders established 'jails,' where slaves could be warehoused, inspected, rehabilitated if necessary, and auctioned, sometimes to minor traders who served as middlemen in the expanding transcontinental enterprise. But while the rationalization of the slave trade may have reduced the slaves' mortality rate, it did nothing to mitigate the essential brutality or the profound alienation that accompanied separation from the physical and social moorings of home and family. ... [T]he Second Middle Passage was extraordinarily lonely, debilitating, and dispiriting. Capturing the mournful character of one southward marching coffle, an observer characterized it as 'a procession of men, women, and children resembling that of a funeral.' Indeed, with men and women dying on the march or being sold and resold, slaves became not merely commodified but cut off from nearly every human attachment. Surrendering to despair, many deportees had difficulties establishing friendships or even maintaining old ones. After a while, some simply resigned themselves to their fate, turned inward, and became reclusive, trying to protect a shred of humanity in a circumstance that denied it. Others exhibited a sort of manic glee, singing loudly and laughing conspicuously to compensate for the sad fate that had befallen them. Yet others fell into a deep depression and determined to march no further. Charles Ball, like others caught in the tide, 'longed to die, and escape from the bonds of my tormentors.' But many who survived the transcontinental trek formed strong bonds of friendships akin to those forged by shipmates on the voyage across the Atlantic. Indeed, the Second Middle Passage itself became a site for remaking African-American society. Mutual trust became a basis of resistance, which began almost simultaneously with the long march. Waiting for their first opportunity and calculating their chances carefully, a few slaves broke free and turned on their enslavers. Murder and mayhem made the Second Middle Passage almost as dangerous for traders as it was for slaves, which was why the men were chained tightly and guarded closely.

On that day, after a youth activity, another friend suggested we leave to go have some fun. I don’t remember where. Strange, that I’ve lost what this was about, though the rest of the scene is etched into the glacial part of my brain. One of us was old enough to drive, so we headed out to their car. Five seats. Six teens. They’d already counted. Without a word to me, the others climbed in. John gave me one hesitant look, then settled into the front passenger seat and closed the door. They left me on the curb. The car vanished, taillights flaring in the night like lit cigarettes. The memory settled in for the long winter. That night. Watching. Remembering John’s face, which was so strikingly conflicted. Half ashamed. Half resigned.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry. But my mind quickly puts me in my place … I remember that I’m on the fourth floor of the Rua dos Douradores; I feel drowsy; I look at my unlovely hand resting on this half-written page and at the cheap cigarette in my left hand, hovering over the fraying blotter.

Here’s what a lot of people don’t get: the opposite of happiness is not anger or If you’re angry or sad, that means you still give a fuck about something. That means something still matters. That means you still have hope. No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference. It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all? Hopelessness is a cold and bleak nihilism, a sense that there is no point, so fuck it—why not run with scissors or shoot up a school? It is the Uncomfortable Truth, a silent realization that in the face of infinity, everything we could possibly care about quickly approaches zero. Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction. This is not an overstatement. Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is the fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future. Delusion, addiction, obsession—these are all the mind’s desperate and compulsive attempts at generating hope one neurotic tic or obsessive craving at a time. The avoidance of hopelessness—that is, the construction of hope—then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.

That was the trouble now. People felt sad, so they got a pill. Work was hard, so people resigned. Marriages went through rocky patches and people got divorced. It was selfishness, pure and simple. And it was all justified by emotions. I’m unhappy. I’m stressed. I need to feel loved. Just having the emotion was enough justification for whatever people did.

In this room, the world is flaunting before me what could, if tested and found false, be its most deadly myth … love … love which, even at the beginning, was revealing itself as partly resignation; perhaps offering only the memory of an attempt to touch … implying hope of a miracle in a world so sadly devoid of miracles. Surrender to a myth constantly belied (a myth which could lull you again falsely in order to seduce you—like that belief in God—into a trap—away from the only thing which made sense—rebellion—no matter how futilely rendered by the fact of decay, of death)—belied, yet sought—sought over and over—as this man himself has searched from person to person … unfound.

efficiency.” “Let them go … why keep them on board this vessel at all?” “They may be of importance to us … perhaps for negotiation purposes later on.” The guard in front of the group opened an energy hatch, then, stepping aside, waited for Hanna and Leon to proceed forward. Ricket noticed their hands were tied behind their backs, bound securely in glowing red virtual handcuffs. “You better think of something, Ricket,” Leon said. Hanna remained quiet. Her resigned sad expression cut right into Ricket’s heart. “I’ll get … both of you … out of this, I promise,” Ricket said. The six entered the circular compartment. As much as Ricket was terrified for what was about to happen to Leon and Hanna, he was equally exhilarated seeing the surrounding area’s technology. Hobel must have observed Ricket’s rapt expression. “This is the MicroVault access terminal.” The compartment was surrounded by a circular, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree virtual window. Looking up, he saw the same virtual window

Japanese tragedy illustrates this aspect of the Trinity better than Greek tragedy, Kitamori taught, because it is based on the feeling expressed by the word tsurasa. This is the peculiar pain felt when someone dies in behalf of another. yet the term implies neither bitterness nor sadness. Nor is tsurasa burdened with the dialectical tension in the struggle with fate that is emphasized in Greek drama, since dialectic is a concept foreign to Japan. Tsurasa is pain with resignation and acceptance. Kitamori called our attention to a Kabuki play, The Village School. The feudal lord of a retainer named Matsuo is defeated in battle and forced into exile. Matsuo feigns allegiance to the victor but remains loyal to his vanquished lord. When he learns that his lord's son and heir, Kan Shusai, has been traced to a village school and marked for execution, Matsuo resolves to save the boy's life. The only way to do this, he realizes, is to substitute a look-alike who can pass for Kan Shusai and be mistakenly killed in his place. Only one substitute will likely pass: Matsuo's own son. So when the enemy lord orders the schoolmaster to produce the head of Kan Shusai, Matsuo's son consents to be beheaded instead. The plot succeeds: the enemy is convinced that the proffered head is that of Kan Shusai. Afterwards, in a deeply emotional scene, the schoolmaster tells Matsuo and his wife that their son died like a true samurai to save the life of the other boy. The parents burst into tears of tsurasa. 'Rejoice my dear,' Matsuo says consolingly to his wife. 'Our son has been of service to our lord.' Tsurasa is also expressed in a Noh drama, The Valley Rite. A fatherless boy named Matsuwaka is befriended by the leader of a band of ascetics, who invites him to accompany the band on a pilgrimage up a sacred mountain. On the way, tragically, Matsuwaka falls ill. According to an ancient and inflexible rule of the ascetics, anyone who falls ill on a pilgrimage must be put to death. The band's leader is stricken with sorrow; he cannot bear to sacrifice the boy he has come to love as his own son. He wishes that 'he could die and the boy live.' But the ascetics follow the rule. They hurl the boy into a ravine, then fling stones and clods of dirt to bury him. The distressed leader then asks to be thrown into the ravine after the boy. His plea so moves the ascetics that they pray for Matsuwaka to be restored to life. Their prayer is answered, and mourning turns to celebration. So it was with God's sacrifice of his Son. The Son's obedience to the Father, the Father's pain in the suffering and death of the Son, the Father's joy in the resurrection - these expressions of a deep personal relationship enrich our understanding of the triune God. Indeed, the God of dynamic relationships within himself is also involved with us his creatures. No impassive God, he interacts with the society of persons he has made in his own image. He expresses his love to us. He shares in our joys and sorrows. This is true of the Holy Spirit as well as the Father and Son... Unity, mystery, relationship - these are the principles of Noh that inform our understanding of the on God as Father, Son, and Spirit; or as Parent, Child, and Spirit; or as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier...this amazing doctrine inspires warm adoration, not cold analysis. It calls for doxology, not definition.

Death rode the sky, alright,” Adrian summarized of that day, in a sad tone of resignation that was repeated in the voice of one survivor after another. “I can close my eyes right now and see that tornado picking up the old Ross place, and just blowing it up.

When the world one loves is seen to be dying, the viewer dies a little with it. A great American painter, Reginald Marsh, exemplifies this truism. Every day until his death at the age of 56, he sketched and painted the most earthy, sweaty and lusty examples of humanity he could lay his eyes upon. His productive voyeurism led him through the entire spectrum of cheap cafes, carnivals, amusement parks, skid rows, exclusive clubs, opera openings, coming-out parties and everything in-between. His super-realistic canvases were jammed with the kind of people he loved to watch in the environments he loved to haunt. As his closing years approached, Reginald Marsh grew depressed at the changing scene. New styles were emerging and it now became more difficult to immerse himself in the vistas from which he had so long drawn, both in his paintings and life itself. His canvases of lumpy women and pot-bellied men were too unappealing for the “think thin” era of the 1950s, and his floozies violated the then-current Grace Kelly/Ivory Soap look. His disdain for modern masters (“Matisse draws like a three-year-old, “Picasso ... a false front”) became exemplified as he summed up modern art as “high and pure and sterile — no sex, no drink, no muscles.” Marsh’s “out of date” feeling reached its zenith when he was asked to take part in an art symposium. The first speaker, who was a then-popular New York painter, enthusiastically championed current trends. Then followed a professor who advocated new and dynamic experimentation in visual appeal. At last it was Reginald Marsh’s turn to speak. He stood on the platform for a moment, as if trying to collect his thoughts. A sad look of resignation appeared in his eyes as he gazed down at the audience. The talented watcher of his innermost secret lusts and life-giving scintillations declared softly, “I am not a man of this century,” and sat down. He died shortly thereafter.

His father shook him roughly to get his attention. “Listen to me, boy. I need you to take care of your sisters. You hear me?” Even though he was the youngest of the Dagan children and only eight years old, it was something his dad always said to him. “Yeah, I know.” “No, Cai, you don’t. You’re too young to comprehend what I’m trying to tell you, but you have to try.” There was a sadness in his father’s eyes that scared him. A resignation that had never been there before and it made him want to cry. But Dagans didn’t cry and he wasn’t about to let his dad see him act like one of his sisters. His father cupped his face in his calloused palm. “It’ll be years before you understand what’s happening—if even then. But I need you to listen to me and trust me. I won’t be here to protect you anymore.” Caillen

You’re in love with him,” Sandra said in a delighted whisper. Lily thought of her half-section of land, of the corn crops and fruit trees that would one day grow there. She forced herself to remember that Caleb wanted to keep her, not marry her. And, of course, there was the fact that he was a soldier. “No!” she protested, guarding her dreams. Sandra folded her hands in her lap. Her amethyst eyes sparkled with mischief. “I don’t believe you.” “I don’t care,” Lily snapped, out of patience. Sandra laughed. “You needn’t be so testy about it. Caleb never loved me, Lily—I’m no worry to you.” “If he didn’t love you, why did the two of you get married?” Lily asked reasonably. Sandra’s slender shoulders moved in a pretty shrug. “My aunt and uncle are among Caleb’s oldest friends. I suppose we were sort of thrown together.” Lily found the courage to ask, “Did you love him?” Sandra thought carefully. “I don’t think I knew what love was until it was too late and I’d lost him.” A terrible sadness swept through Lily. “But you love him now?” “Yes,” Sandra said with a small, resigned sigh. “For all the good it does me. I had hoped Caleb might see things differently if I came back, but I was too late. You’re here.” Lily was sitting on the very edge of her chair. Not since her years with the Sommers family had she felt like such an intruder. “I’ll go back to Tylerville,” she promised. “If only the stage hasn’t left.” Sandra reached out and closed her hand over Lily’s. “You mustn’t go—you belong here, with Caleb.” “You seem to think this is much more serious than it is,” Lily hastened to explain. “I hardly know Caleb. We sat together in church, and he came to supper one night, but—” “His eyes glowed when he told me about the picnic,” Sandra interrupted. Lily wondered if he’d mentioned kissing her. “He—he told you?” “We talk about everything,” Sandra said. “Caleb regards me as a friend.” These

I love you,” I tell him, and I climb up to lie on his chest. I turn my head so that my ear is directly over his heart. It’s steady and strong and…mine. “Will you love me forever?” I ask. I lift my head to look into his face. “And a day,” he affirms. “Matt,” I start. I don’t know how to say what I want to say. “You mentioned that it would take a miracle for you to get me pregnant.” “Yeah,” he says quietly. “What if I said that I believe in miracles?” “I’d say you’re wishing for things you can’t have.” He doesn’t stop touching me, so he’s not mad or sad. He’s just resigned to it. “But—” I start. He puts a finger over my lips. “But nothing, Sky,” he says. “You’re my fucking miracle. Not a baby. I don’t need a baby to make me whole. I just need you.” He laughs. “And I get your kids as a bonus. What more could I ask for?” “Matt, could you move in with me?” I ask. I hold my breath as I wait for the answer. “What about Seth?” he asks. “We could have a talk with Seth.” “I’ll talk to him when we go home in the morning.

It's the fantasy of a life gone wrong. You've been doing the best you can, but it's hard and you're tired. Then something horrible happens and you get to give up and go be sad somewhere. There's something oddly comforting in that kind of existential resignation.

The path dips down to Gal Vihara: a wide, quiet, hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. The vicar general, shying away from "paganism." hangs back and sits under a tree reading the guidebook. I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more "imperative" than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no "mystery." All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya... everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything: it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it. The whole thing is very much a Zen Garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence, and the great figures, motionless, yet with the lines in full movement, waves of vesture and bodily form, a beautiful and holy vision. The rest of the "city", the old palace complex, I had no time for. We just drove around the roads and saw the ruined shapes, and started on the long drive home to Kandy.

Light brings greater knowledge. Knowledge brings greater understanding. And twelve people discussing something rationally and reasonably, questioning each other, trying to get it right, guarantees greater knowledge and greater understanding... Some say that last Thursday was a sad day for American democracy, but I felt as I did when Watergate came to light, and Nixon resigned. For me it was the act that was sad, that one person was that corrupt and those around him that corruptible. For me, that it came to light and led to consequences is the triumph.