In My Very Own Self, I Am

Why, Oh Why Must One Grow Up, Why Must One Inherit This Heavy, Numbing Responsibility Of Living An Undiscovered Life? Out Of The Nothingness And The Undifferentiated Mass, To Make Something Of Herself! But What? In The Obscurity And Pathlessness To Take A Direction! But Whither? How Take Even One Step? And Yet, How Stand Still? This Was Torment Indeed, To Inherit The Responsibility Of One’s Own Life.

For Man, The Vast Marvel Is To Be Alive. For Man, As For Flower And Beast And Bird, The Supreme Triumph Is To Be Most Vividly, Most Perfectly Alive. Whatever The Unborn May Know, They Cannot Know The Beauty, The Marvel Of Being Alive In The Flesh. The Dead May Look After The Afterwards. But The Magnificent Here And Now Of Life In The Flesh Is Ours, And Ours Alone, And Ours Only For A Time.

Sometimes Snakes Can’t Slough. They Can’t Burst Their Old Skin. Then They Go Sick And Die Inside The Old Skin, And Nobody Ever Sees The New Pattern. It Needs A Real Desperate Recklessness To Burst Your Old Skin At Last. You Simply Don’t Care What Happens To You, If You Rip Yourself In Two, So Long As You Do Get Out.

The Great Pagan World Of Which Egypt And Greece Were The Last Living Termsonce Had A Vast And Perhaps Perfect Science Of Itsown, A Science In Terms Of Life. In Our Era This Science Crumbled Into Magic And Charlatanry. But Even Wisdom Crumbles.

When Passion Is Dead, Or Absent, Then The Magnificent Throb Of Beauty Is Incomprehensible And Even A Little Despicable.