Our grasp upon the world is a
Strangle-Hold about our own neck!²
The meaning of life comes only as we struggle
To wring meaning out of Meaningless Suffering.³
This happiness is provisional: the Looming
Presences—great Suffering & great Fear—
Withdraw only into our peripheral vision.⁴
For each Ecstatic instant, we must
An Anguish pay—in keen and
Quivering ratio, to the ecstasy.⁵
There’s no escape—
But into what is still Worse—⁶
And, in the lowest deep: a Lower Deep
Threatens to devour us—opens wide—⁷
Puny griefs in your transitory shapes—
Ye are henceforth dwarfed by the Dread
Extremes of what I’m starting to become—⁸
We’ve acquired a dimension of suffering which
Poisons & Devours our whole being,
As far as we can see—Forever.⁹
There is only one thing that I Dread:
Not to be worthy of my Suffering.¹⁰
¹ Gerard Manley Hopkins, No Worst, There is None
² Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
³ Richard Wright, Black Boy
⁴ Denise Levertov, Of Being
⁵ Emily Dickinson, For Each Ecstatic Instant
⁶ Hermann Hesse tr. Hilda Rosner, The Journey to the East
⁷ John Milton, Paradise Lost
⁸ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Drama of Exile
⁹ Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
¹⁰ Fyodor Dostoevsky, quoted in Man’s Search for Meaning