Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
— Raymond Carver
I pile books on the bed
in your place, calculate
the weight of you, I crowd
the pillows like
bodies, all night I’m wasteful
with lamplight
— Thomas Dooley (2014)
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”
— Carl Jung
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T S Eliot, Four Quartets: Little Gidding
“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves