Eckstein

NOT, I'll not, carrion comfort,
Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

-----

But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the
Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

---Gerald Manley Hopkins


At bottom every human being knows quite well that, as a unique being, he is but once in the world and that no imaginable chance will for a second time bring together such a wonderfully variegated assortment as he is into one. [...] that every human being is a one-time wonder, they dare to show us the human as it is, uniquely itself right down to every moment of the muscles, and what is more, that in this strict consistency of its uniqueness, it is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, new and incredible like every work of nature, and not the least tedious.

--Nietzsche (courtesy of anton)


And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that what we are is what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and with thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if only we would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.