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They say my verse is sad: no wonder.
Its narrow measure spans
Rue for eternity, and sorrow
Not mine, but man's.

This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they're in trouble
And I am not.
--
Foreword

 

A. E. Housman

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What similarity is there between her sorrow and mine, what solidarity is there between guilt and innocence, what kinship is there between repentance and an esthetic sorrow over life, when that which awakens repentance is that which awakens her sorrow? I can sorrow in my way; if she must sorrow, she must also do in on her own account. A girl may submit to a man in many things, but not in the ethical; and it is unethical for her and for me to sorrow jointly in this way. Taking this path, how will she ever come to sorrow religiously when she must leave undecided an ethical issue such as my behavior toward her, when it is indeed over its result that she wishes to sorrow. Would that I might be a woman for half a year so that I could learn how she is dissimilar to man. I fully realize that there are examples of women who have conducted themselves in this way. Psychologically I have them right at hand, but in my opinion they are all wasted individualities. My view of life is meaningless if I must personally experience that one individual is being squandered upon another, and squandered she is if it goes this way. As soon as she begins to venture along the narrow way to a religious movement, she is lost to me. A woman can have passion as strong or perhaps stronger than a man, but contradiction in passion is not a task for her, such as the task of simultaneously giving up and preserving the wish. If she works purely religiously to give up the wish, she is transformed; if the moment for its fulfillment ever did come, she would no longer understand it. The religious movement of infinity may not be natural to her individuality. Her pride may not be sufficiently energetic to save her in an intensification of temporality. If she had been thoroughly proud, this would have happened, humanly speaking. This, too, may be why the religious does not take effect with the turning of the infinite. The religious eternity very likely does not become the eternal decision but a spacing out of the temporal. So eternity has paused at her side, consoled her, just as in Homer the god or the goddess hurries to the aid of the hero. She believed it was the decision of eternity, she believed it was her death, she believed all was lost, but see, because she was not so much awakened to this eternal decision as weary from futile wishing and weary of the futile act of renunciation, she gently slumbered on into eternity; then time passed, and she woke up and belonged to life once again. Thus there was even a possibility of a new alliance, a new falling in love. This was indeed what I wanted; then she is really free.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

Went to the new Church both morning and afternoon, and read service in the afternoon. I got through it all with great success, till I came to read out the first verse of the hymn before the sermon, where the two words ‘strife strengthened,’ coming together, were too much for me, and I had to leave the verse unfinished.

 

Charles (Lewis Carroll) Dodgson

 

Went to the new Church both morning and afternoon, and read service in the afternoon. I got through it all with great success, till I came to read out the first verse of the hymn before the sermon, where the two words ‘strife strengthened,’ coming together, were too much for me, and I had to leave the verse unfinished.

 

Lewis Carroll

 

Campbell: Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. "All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn't be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow. Loss, loss, loss.
Moyers: That's a pessimistic note.
Campbell: Well, you have to say yes to it, you have to say it's great this way. It's the way God intended it.

 

Joseph Campbell

 

The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him. If he had treated me as he is said to have treated Protagoras, Hippias, and Gorgias, I could never have forgiven him.

 

Socrates