"The night is darkening round me"

The night is darkening round me
The wild winds coldly blow
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot cannot go

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go

Clouds beyond clouds above me
Wastes beyond wastes below
But nothing dear can move me
I will not cannot go

 Emily Jane Brontë

To Himself (A se stesso)

Now be for ever still,
Weary my heart. For the last cheat is dead,
I thought eternal. Dead. For us, I know
Not only the dear hope
Of being deluded gone, but the desire.
Rest still for ever. You
Have beaten long enough. And to no purpose
Were all your stirrings; earth not worth your sighs.
Boredom and bitterness
Is life; and the rest, nothing; the world is dirt.
Lie quiet now. Despair
For the last time. Fate granted to our kind
Only to die. And now you may despise
Yourself, nature, the brute
Power which, hidden, ordains the common doom,
And all the immeasurable emptiness of things.

 Leopardi

The Infinite

This solitary hill has always been dear to me
And this hedge, which prevents me from seeing most of
The endless horizon.
But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughts
Endless spaces beyond the hedge,
An all encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,
To the point that my heart is almost overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind rustling through the trees
I compare its voice to the infinite silence.
And eternity occurs to me, and all the ages past,
And the present time, and its sound.
Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:
And to founder in this sea is sweet to me.

Count Giacomo Leopardi

The Immortals - Hermann Hesse

Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, spasmodic lust;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you evermore residing
In the ether’s star-translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star-bright is our eternal laughter.

Angelus Silesius - Time

Eternity is time And time eternity, Except when we ourselves. Would make them different be.

Things in eternity Are all at once in prime, No after nor before Is there, as here in time.

Who would expect it so? From darkness light is brought, Life rises out of Death, and Something comes from Naught.

Two eyes our souls possess: While one is turned on time, The other seeth things Eternal and sublime.

My heart below is strait, On top 't is wide and stout. It must have room for God. But earthly things keep out.

O Christian once thou must Down into Hell be led. If not while still in life, Thou must go down when dead.

Trust me, my friend, if God Should bid me not to dwell In heaven, I'd stay here Or go, as lief, to Hell.

When quitting time, I am Myself eternity. I shall be one with God, God one with me shall be.

What did eternal God Before time had begun? He loved Himself and thus Begot He God, the Son.

What you for others wish, You for yourself suggest. If you don't wish them well, Your own death you request.

A soul redeemed and blessed No more knows otherhood. It is with God one light And one beatitude.

In Heaven life is good: No-one has aught alone. What one possesses, there All others too will own.

Plurality God loathes, Therefore He has decreed That all men should in Christ Be only one indeed.

Beware man of thyself, Self's burden thou wilt rue. It will impair thee more, Than thousand devils do.

Three enemies has man: Himself, Satan, the world; The first will be the last That to the ground is hurled.

Were e'en in Christ himself, Some little will at all, However blessed he be, Surely from grace he'd fall.

The highest worship is Like unto God to grow, Christlike to be in life, In habit, and love's glow.

Like unto Christ is he Who truly loves his foe, For persecutors prays, And renders good for woe.

***

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don’t want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It’s something relative to the past and the future.
It’s a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don’t want to include time in my scheme.
I don’t want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.
I don’t want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.

I shouldn’t even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can’t think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn’t a science.

(undated)

Alberto Caeiro

***

Whatever it is in the center of the World,
It gave me the exterior world as an example of Reality,
And when I say “This is real,” even about a feeling,
I can’t help seeing it in some exterior space,
I see it with some vision outside me and alien to me.

Being real means not being inside myself.
I have no notion of reality inside my person.
I know that the world exists but I don’t know if I exist.
I’m more certain of the existence of my white house
Than of the existence of the owner of my white house.
I believe more in my body than in my soul,
Because my body is present in the middle of reality,
Able to be seen by others,
To touch others,
To sit and stand,
But my soul can only be defined in terms of the outside.
It exists for me — in the moments when I believe it actually does exist —
Borrowed from the exterior reality of the World.

If the soul is more real
Than the exterior world, as you say, philosopher,
Why was the exterior world given to me as the model of reality?

If it’s more certain I sense
Than the thing I sense exists —
Why do I sense
And why does the thing rise up independently of me
Without needing me to exist,
And I’m always joined to me-myself, always personal and intransmissible?
Why do I move with others
In a world where we meet each other and where we’re in the same place
If this world is somehow wrong and it’s me that’s right?
If the world is wrong, then it’s everybody’s error.
And each one of us is only the error of each one of us.
Thing for thing, the World is more certain.

But why do I question myself, if not because I’m sick?

On certain days, the exterior days of my life,
My days of perfect natural lucidity,
I feel without feeling I feel,
I see without knowing I see,
And the Universe is never as real as those times,
The Universe is never (not near or far from me
But) so sublimely not-mine.

When I say “It’s evident,” do I somehow mean “It’s only me who sees it?”
When I say “It’s the truth,” do I somehow mean “It’s my opinion?”
When I say “There it is,” do I somehow mean “There it isn’t?”
And if this is so in life, why should it be different in philosophy?
We live before philosophizing; we exist before we know we do.
The first fact deserves at least precedence and worship.
Yes, rather than interior, we’re exterior,
So we’re essentially exterior.

You say, sick philosopher, philosopher to the end, that this is materialism.
But how can this be materialism, if materialism is a philosophy,
If a philosophy would be, at least if it were mine, a philosophy of mine,
And this isn’t even mine, and I’m not even I?

(10/24/1917)


Alberto Caeiro

***

Every time I think about a thing, I betray it.
I should only think about it having it in front of me.
Not thinking, but looking,
Not with thought, but with the eyes.
A thing that’s visible exists to be seen,
And what exists for the eyes doesn’t have to exist for thought;
Or else it would only exist for thought and not for the eyes.

I look, and things exist.
I think and only I exist.

(5/21/1917)

Alberto Caeiro

***

I’d like to have enough time and quiet
To think about absolutely nothing,
To not ever feel myself living,
To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.

(5/21/1917)

Alberto Caeiro