THE soul should always stand ajar, That if the heaven inquire, He will not be obliged to wait, Or shy of troubling her. Depart, before the host has slid The bolt upon the door, To seek for the accomplished guest, -- Her visitor no more.
Look what you've already come through! Don't deny it. You've already come through some things, which are very painful. If you've been alive until you're 35, you have gone through some pain. It cost you something. And you've come through it. So at least look at that. And have a sense to look at yourself and say, "Well, wait a minute. I'm stronger than I thought I was."
I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that.
The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer's Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.
There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
squandering your unquoted mirth,
which keeps the ground, and never soars,
while jake retorts, and reuben roars;
tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
goes like bullet to its mark;
while the solid curse and jeer
never balk the waiting ear.
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
Jealousy, you know, is usually not an affair of causes. It is much more-how shall I say?-fundamental than that. Based on the knowledge that one's love is not returned. And so one goes on waiting, watching, expecting...that the loved one will turn to someone else.