A grief observed - CSLewis

One.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessnss, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met J. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

Two.

On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent J. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it.

For J. wasn’t like that at all. Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. Passion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure—and there’s another red-hot jab—of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as J.’s lover.

Three.

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much J. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.

Four.

It is like a door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean?

Five.

For those few years J. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens.

We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe.

Six.

I cannot talk to the anyone about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood. Or are the boys right? What would J. herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all?—no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it . But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defence. 

Seven.

An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the family, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t.

Perhaps we ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.

To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happy pair I can feel them both thinking, ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now’.

Eight.

At first I was very afraid of going to places where we had been happy— But I decided to do it at once—like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference.

Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of J.’s lover. Now it’s like an empty house.

Nine.

One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone. How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!

When I speak of fear, I mean the merely animal fear, the recoil of the organism from its destruction; the smothery feeling; the sense of being a rat in a trap. It can’t be transferred. The mind can sympathize; the body, less. In one way the bodies of lovers can do it least. All their love passages have trained them to have, not identical, but complementary, correlative, even opposite, feelings about one another.

We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation (‘You, Madam, to the right—you, Sir, to the left’) is just the beginning of the separation which is death itself.

Ten.

Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop? Unless you assume that some other means of communication—utterly different, yet doing the same work—would be immediately substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones?

I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?

Shes gone. She is gone. Is the word so difficult to learn?

I have no photograph of her that’s any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions—waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking—that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Eleven.

 She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief. Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them—that is, in earthly life—they appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes,  the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘J. is gone,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’

It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’

Thirteen.

If J. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared.

Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much.

Fourteen.

Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? . Such was J.’s landfall

Fifteen.

I have to be knocked silly before I come to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture do I discover it himself.

And I must surely admit—J. would have forced me to admit in a few passes—that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better. And only suffering could do it. But then the Cosmic Sadist becomes an unnecessary hypothesis.

Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now?

Sixteen.

It’s likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards. And I shan’t know whether it is or not until the next blow comes— when, say, fatal disease is diagnosed in my body too, or war breaks out, or I have ruined myself by some

ghastly mistake in my work. But there are two questions here. In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, or because I only dream that I believe them?

As for the things themselves, why should the thoughts I had a week ago be any more trustworthy than the better thoughts I have now? I am surely, in general, a saner man than I was then. Why should the desperate imaginings of a man dazed—I said it was like being concussed—be especially reliable?

Because there was no wishful thinking in them?

Because, being so horrible, they were therefore all the more likely to be true? But there are fear-fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment dreams. And were they wholly distasteful? No. In a way I liked them. I am even aware of a slight reluctance to accept the opposite thoughts. All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just a—mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment.

Seventeen:

Suffering. It is harder when I think of hers. What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War

One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is. What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Will she come back?

Eighteen:

J. was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made even brighter

Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I’d had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep; and after ten days of grey skies and warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned J. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.

Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his love' when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’

Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about people who leave us? ‘Them as asks’ (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’) don’t get. Perhaps can’t.

Nineteen:

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had J. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to J. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many roadblocks.

Twenty:

For a good love contains so many persons in herself. What was J. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier, co-star, temptress, my sun. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal. That’s what I meant when I once praised her for her ‘masculine virtues.’ ‘It was too perfect to last,’ so I am tempted to say of our love. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic—as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it (‘Not happening!’)

 But it could also mean ‘This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.’ As if God said, ‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.’ When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on.

Twenty-One

And then one or other leaves. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off— something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation, then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, loss is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.

Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concerned about my memory of J. and how false it might become. For some reason— the merciful good sense is the only one I can think of—I have stopped bothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. I don’t mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don’t mean even any strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.

Twenty Two:

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop.

Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.

Still, there’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. I’ve read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it myself. I am sure J. wouldn’t approve of it. She’d tell me not to be a fool.

Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. But that’s not the whole of the explanation. I think there is also a confusion. We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself.

I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh.

An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often—will it be for always?—how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again.

They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved.

Twenty Three:

In so far as this record was a defence against total collapse, a safetyvalve, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago.

That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat

Here, for instance, is a new phase, a new loss. I do all the walking I can, for I’d be a fool to go to bed not tired. Today I have been revisiting old haunts, taking one of the long rambles that made me so happy. And this time the face of nature was not emptied of its beauty and the world didn’t look (as I complained some days ago) like a mean street. On the contrary, every horizon, every stile or clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my pre-J. happiness. But the invitation seemed to me horrible. The happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way. It frightens me to think that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal—something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus J. would leave  me a second time; a worse loss than the first. Anything but that.

Twenty Four (2 and 4)

Did you ever know, dearest, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.

Still, there are the two enormous gains—I know myself too well now to call them ‘lasting.’ Turned to  my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to J., it no longer meets that vacuum—nor all that fuss about my mental image of her. My jottings show something of the process, but not so much as I’d hoped. Perhaps both changes were really not observable. There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time.

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order

But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I’ve described J as being like a sword. That’s true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have balanced it. I ought to have said, ‘But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered.’

Twenty Five.

Imagine a man in total darkness. He thinks he is in a cellar or dungeon. Then there comes a sound. He thinks it might be a sound from far off—waves or wind-blown trees or cattle half a mile away. And if so, it proves he’s not in a cellar, but free, in the open air. Or it may be a much smaller sound close at hand—a chuckle of laughter. And if so, there is a friend just beside him in the dark. Either way, a good, good sound. I’m not mad enough to take such an experience as evidence for anything. It is simply the leaping into imaginative activity of an idea which I would always have theoretically admitted—the idea that I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in.

Five senses;

an incurably abstract intellect;
a haphazardly selective memory;
a set of preconceptions and
assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become even conscious of them all.

How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

 Twenty Six:

I need Heaven, not something that resembles it. I want J., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me, however, their danger is more obvious

The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is gone

For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still there—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life—that’s one way it differs from novels—his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about.

Twenty Seven :

If I knew that to be eternally divided from J. and eternally forgotten by her would add a greater joy and splendour to her being, of course I’d say, ‘Fire ahead.’ Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged never to see her again. I’d have had to. Any decent person would. But that’s quite different. That’s not the situation I’m in.

Twenty Eight:

I often think that J sees me. And I assume, whether reasonably or not, that if she sees me at all she see us more clearly than before. Does J. now see exactly how am I? So be it. Look your hardest, dear. I wouldn’t hide if I could. We didn’t idealize each other. We tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it.

So can you. Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives—to both, but perhaps especially to the woman—a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

Twenty Nine

The epilogue is still incomplete even after putting all this down.

Thirty

I wont write about this anymore – Lenoidas never fought his own wife, the Spartans never fought their own armies, and as for the last time we met and you told me I was one of those persons who wouldn`t want it to happen, let me tell you. You were wrong.

- i wouldn`t know where Lewis began and i ended or otherwise.I could relate to him and he could to me. 

Her

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth —that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in  contemplation . In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way— in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of her, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory". My mind still clung to her image. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she still bothered I knew only one thing—which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my dearest. Had I known then that she now had someone else,better company, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. " love is as strong as death." This intensification of inner life helped me find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty, by letting me escape into the past. When given free rein, my imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. My nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character. Their world and their existence seemed very distant and the spirit reached out for them longingly: In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment to let her in, answered her calls. thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories are all that's left.

Frankl - Me

The night

It is just this black..
A dark velvety blanket..
Which hides me from the world around..
This black enslaves a part of me..
As I stand beneath it..
It waits like this huge monster..
Not the bad kind..
Not all monsters r bad ..
This monster talks to me..
It talks abt light.. Abt how people dislike him and love the light..
Of how the tiny little twinkling stars..
So many of them..
Hide
When they see the bright glow..because they r scared of being burnt..
So they come out in the night..
Coz they like the shade ..
The stars like the shade.
You were the night to this star J..

Sparrow

Ok so its world sparrow day today and I'm planning to write a note for you to read.

So when I look at a sparrow I think of you. (well everything and everywhere I look I see traces of you - a song I've sung a lot of times- anyways)

So wat is it in you that I find common with a sparrow.

Sparrows are small, plump, brown-grey birds with short tails and stubby, powerful beaks. They chirp sweetly, are happy in their own world, dont ask for much, you see them you have an undeniable need to smile. They aren't bothered by eagles, vultures or infact anyone and once you look at them you just dont want to stop, you see them jumping nd they are so damn cute when do that.

J is a small, plump, brown-grey human with short tails (patience) and stubby, powerful beaks ( you know what this means). She chirps sweetly, is happy in her own world, doesnt ask for much
you see them you have an undeniable need to smile. She  isn't bothered by eagles, vultures or infact anyone and once you look at her you just dont want to stop, you see her jumping around when she's chirpy nd she is so damn cute when she does that.

Sparrow
You

Hdk

Godzilla

Go.out like the snow..

Let d foolish city know..

The winter queen has come..

Summer tidings..foolish bum..

Magnificence is on her way..

Silly Godzilla ..go away..

Coz she's mine to stay..

Stupid.Godzilla go.away

Or jankosaurous will slay..

Stupid Godzilla go away.

Let her bee

Well I imagine the first ray of light...
Is tat coz ure white...

Or it was but a dark.. surreal night..
That passed in front of sight.

You, the laughing breeze..
You, that carefree ease...

Ur sound..
The world would freeze...
Smiling world,
 say cheese..

Forget the day..
Remember d week..

The way she flows..
Valiant
meek..

Gulaab jamoon ..

Wen she says..
Its like a spell..
For happy days..

Magic is she...
The queen bee..
World, please let her be.

Orgasmic Price

Its difficult for a woman..so wonderful..to let her true desires come out..in this wild wild world..

We constantly see what's happening..these insects dont let the flowers bloom..
..
 Closed doors.. Ur eyes n mine..
The souls already
unclothed..
Unscathed..
Unexamined..
 hold hands..
Soft flowers..
put lips and taste them..
clasp the other hand..fingers interwine..
Forever waiting to be closed..
grab u closer.. ur chest brushes mine..
pull you even closer..I hear you breathe.
 let the hair loose open.. let the river flow..
 unwrap your tshirt.. Unclasp the bra...
As Ur spine..ever so erect..
Feels a chill.. Run down..
. A blossomed flower
...Fresh as dewy grass..
as the first rains..
I kiss them lips..while tongues make love ...
...
let my body rise....
My teeth ur neck..
As I leave my mark...
And then ur breasts..
sucking the fruit so ripe..
nipples stretch ..as I get real high...
My hands then hold ....
As I sink my face..between two legs..so mute..
U gasp..u shriek.. As I suck you in..
Ecstasy arise...
Orgasmic price

---------------------------------------------------------

I love them.lips
A peck on them tonight...
Seeing u, in bed every-time..
invokes passion unbound..
the surge is involuntary...
as wat rises..
 wants to meet u as it's end..

---------------------------------------------------------------

.. too tired to find words yesterday ..

came ur lips..
Strawberries cheeries..
Ripened..
Filled wid passion ..
Nd burning desire...

I forgot my promises ..
And I kissed those lips..
Mine on yours..
One over another ...

as u responded ...
I tasted ecstasy..
A mouthful..
My tongue found a mate ..
And it rolled over yours...

kissed ur neck...
And as I moved down..
clasped ur burning breasts..
bodies one..
found a way inside..
Bodies stripped of clothes..

Mind of thot..
Me inside u..
U inside me..

Heaving..
Moaning..
Living..
breathing.

-------------------------------------------------------

Thighs..
Aah highs...

Tall cliffs..
The what iffss..

Heart dips.
Red lips..

Unclothed you,
Baby blue,

these legs,
Whiskied pegs..
I'm  drunk on you,
Fall in ur arms..
Daisy farms..

butt cheeks cute..
Imagination ..now gone brute..
Let me see more
I implore


-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh c'mon you ...
Oh yes you...

U dewy eyed girl..
Wanna have some funn..

Ye fun...

While ur daddys not home..
Do yu wanna have fun..

I'll teach u play..
The guitar ..
pretty clay..
I'll mould u away....

Away..
Away
Away..

Little girl..away..

The C minor there..
The 4 th string here..
Oh c'mon here..
C'mon here..

U little girl..
wanna have fun..

C'mon here..
Oh c'mon here..

I'll teach u to make..
A happy poem...

A few birds here..
A galactical object there..

And those dumb boys..
Will swoon here and there...

Everywhere..
Everywhere..

Everywhere..little girl..

Theyll swoon everywhere..

So, little girl do you wanna have fun..
 While your daddy's not in..

Lets get this done..
Get some fun..