The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.

Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.

Lynsay Sands, Love Bites

MY TIME
Wilhelm Klemm (1917)
translation by Oliver Sheppard

Song and giant cities, dream-avalanches,
Nations melt away, poles without fame,
Sinful women, hardships and heroism,
Ghostly brows—storms upon iron rails.

Propellers chop through shredded clouds.
People are blown apart. Books open into witches.
The soul devolves into its own small substructures.
Art is dead. The hours spiral faster away.

O, this era! Unspeakably butchered
And starless! Lightless and moronic, having neither knowledge nor life.
No other era resembles this one.

The Sphinx has never crooked her head up like now.
Yet you look to the left, and to the right, instead of to the sure path ahead.
And your torment makes you weep! There’s insanity’s vortex.