You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

----

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

----

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

--James Baldwin

Darwin knew dukkha

"One lives only to make blunders."

"I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids, and today I hate them worse than everything."

"I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything."

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/18/163181524/charles-darwin-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day

In December of 2005, a cancer made its presence suddenly and dramatically known--a melanoma in my right eye, which presented as a sudden incandescence to one side and then a partial blindness....The cancer was irradiated, then lasered several times, because certain areas kept regrowing. During the first eighteen months of treatment, sight fluctuated in my right eye almost daily, from near blind to near normal, and I would be thrown, with these fluctuations, from terror to relief, then back to terror--from one emotional extreme to another.
This would have been hard to bear (and I would have been even harder to live with) had I not become fascinated by some of the visual phenomena which occurred as, bit by bit, my retina--and eyesight--were nibbled away by the tumor and the lasering: the wild topological distortions, the perversions of color, the clever but automatic filling in of blind spots, the incontinent spread of color and form, the continued perception of objects and scenes when the eyes were closed, and, not least, the varied hallucinations which now swarmed in my ever-larger blind spots. My brain was clearly as involved as the eye itself....
Without binocular vision, I now had many new, disabling (but sometimes enthralling!) phenomena to contend with--and investigate....I was not only physically blind but mentally blind, to the right. I could no longer even imagine the presence of what I could no longer see. Such a hemi-neglect, as neurologists call it, is usually the result of a stroke or a tumor in the visual or parietal areas of the brain. For me, as a neurologist, these phenomena were especially fascinating, for they provided an astonishing panorama of the ways in which the brain works (or misworks, or fails to work) when the input from the senses is deficient or abnormal...The whole experience became an experiment with, or on, myself.
The perceptual consequences of my eye damage constituted a fertile ground of enquiry. I felt as if I were discovering as whole world of strange phenomena, although I could not help thinking that all patients with eye problems like mine surely experienced some of the same perceptual phenomena as I did. Writing of my own experiences, then, I would also be writing for them. But the sense of discovery was exhilarating and kept me going through what might otherwise have been rather fearful and demoralizing years, as did my continuing seeing patients and writing.

--from "On the Move", the memoirs of Oliver Sacks.

Blessing When the World is Ending

Look, the world
is always ending
somewhere.


Somewhere
the sun has come
crashing down.


Somewhere
it has gone
completely dark.


Somewhere
it has ended
with the gun
the knife
the fist.


Somewhere
it has ended
with the slammed door
the shattered hope.


Somewhere
it has ended
with the utter quiet
that follows the news
from the phone
the television
the hospital room.


Somewhere
it has ended
with a tenderness
that will break
your heart.


But, listen,
this blessing means
to be anything
but morose.
It has not come
to cause despair.


It is simply here
because there is nothing
a blessing
is better suited for
than an ending,
nothing that cries out more
for a blessing
than when a world
is falling apart.


This blessing
will not fix you
will not mend you
will not give you
false comfort;
it will not talk to you
about one door opening
when another one closes.


It will simply
sit itself beside you
among the shards
and gently turn your face
toward the direction
from which the light
will come,
gathering itself
about you
as the world begins
again.


--Jan Richardson

Robin McKinley: the Hero and the Crown

A blast of grief, of the deaths of children, of crippling diseases that took beauty at once but withheld death; of unconsummated love, of love lost or twisted and grown to hate; of noble deeds that proved useless, that broke the hearts of their doers; of betrayal without reason, of guilt without penance, of all the human miseries that have ever occurred; all this struck them, like the breath of a slaughterhouse, or the blow of a murderer. Tor fell to his knees and covered his face with his hands, the beasts cringed back, moaning. Aerin put out her hand, leaned against the doorframe; just this she had feared, had half expected, yet the reality was much worse than what her tired mind had been able to prepare her for.
Greetings, said Maur's head. I did not think to have the pleasure of seeing you again.
It is you, responded Aerin. She opened her mouth to gasp, and despair rushed in, bitter as aloes. Tears filled her eyes, but she pushed herself away from the threshold and bent slowly and carefully to pick up the candle Tor had set down before he opened the door. She shook her head to clear her vision, held the candle aloft, and stepped inside the high vaulted room, despite the silent keening of the air.
I know despair, she said. There is nothing more that you can show me.
Oh?
The keening changed tone and madness edged it, drifted across her skin, fluttered in her hair like bats' wings; she ducked and the candle guttered and almost went out. Maur laughed. She remembered that silent hollow laugh.
Angry, she said: Nothing!