But then you needed to return
to the desert of your heart.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
My body’s a mess, my heart impoverished.
“One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji,” Osamu Dazai, trans. Ralph McCarthy
Imagine that. Even when we’re pressing snooze and rolling over in bed, folding ourselves into our covers and postponing the day’s bubbling over, and soon after notching cold butter on warm toast, or later coming to a halt as we bound up a flight of subway stairs only to stall behind an elderly woman whose left leg trails behind her right leg—one leaden step at a time—even then, when time decelerates and the relative importance of our lives, of our hurry, undergoes a sudden, essential audit; even then, our heart never stops… despite these bouts of wonder and alarm, when my heart races, dimples, is weary and deflates, it never exhausts. How is that possible? How does it maintain? Stays going. On and on.
“Heart Museum,” Durga Chew-Bose
Break off my arms, and I will hold you
with my heart as if it were a hand;
strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;
and should you set fire to my brain,
I can still carry you with my blood.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
This body isn’t a trial run
for your real life.
Take your life
in your hands. Make your hands useful
or you’ll be sorry.
You say sorry
more than anything else.
Natalie Wee
If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning.
Nick Cave
And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
We know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.
Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.
Andrei Tarkovsky
For imagining an individual’s existence as a larger or smaller room reveals to us that most people are only acquainted with one corner of their particular room, a place by the window, a little area to pace up and down. That way, they have a certain security. And yet the perilous uncertainty that drives the prisoners in Poe’s tales to grope out the outlines of their terrible dungeons and so to know the unspeakable horrors of their surroundings, is so much more human. But we are not prisoners. There are no traps or snares set up around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or torment us. We are placed into life as into the element with which we have the most affinity, and moreover we have after thousands of years of adaptation come to resemble this life so closely that if we keep still we can, thanks to our facility for mimicry, hardly be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then we must try to love them. And if we only organize our life according to the principle which teaches us always to hold to what is difficult, then what now still appears most foreign will become our most intimate and most reliable experience. How can we forget those ancient myths found at the beginnings of all peoples? The myths about the dragons who at the last moment turn into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses, only waiting for the day when they will see us handsome and brave? Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself... And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And inasfar as you are your own doctor, this above all is what you must do now
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery.
Saul Bellow
“蔵焼けて 障るものなき 月見哉 (Since my house burned down I now own a better view of the rising moon)”
Mizuta Masahide
Bless
these burnt wings. Bless.
Would I do it again?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
"Departure," Erika L. Sánchez
It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four.
"Ali Smith
And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life... And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And I can do what I want with it.
Upstream: Selected Essays, Mary Oliver
The bottom line is there's value to be found even in your trash day.
Kodama Maria Bungaku Shuusei (児玉まりあ文学集成)
[F]lee general subjects and take refuge in those offered by your own day-to-day life; depict your sadnesses and desires, passing thoughts and faith in some kind of beauty... If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
(But then that is one of the severest tests of an artist: he must always remain innocent and unconscious of his greatest virtues if he is to avoid depriving them of their uninhibitedness and purity.)
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
One other thing... you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam ‘unskilled laughter’ coming from the fifth row. And that’s right, that’s right—God knows it’s depressing. I’m not saying it isn’t. But that’s none of your business, really. That’s none of your business, Franny. An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.
James Baldwin
I remind myself that language isn’t my job. Writing a poem isn’t my job. My job is the human job of waiting and listening, and language is just what poets use—like wind chimes—to catch the sound of the larger, more essential thing. Wind chimes themselves are not the point. The point is the wind.
Jenny George
Through routine and repetition the world has grown gray and dull: people who live near the seashore no longer hear the waves... Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived.
Bound to Please, Michael Dirda
In days when I was young and didn't know the taste of sorrow
I like to climb the storied tower,
I like to climb the storied tower;
To write the latest odes I forced myself to tell of sorrow.
Now that I understand the taste of sorrow altogether
I would like to tell, but stop,
I would like to tell, but stop;
Instead I say, 'What a cool day! Such lovely autumn weather!'
Xin Qiji
Ms. Howe
I have to read it. When I was a girl, Saint Teresa and her practice of dailiness, and my father was sometimes extreme in his demands on us. And for a while, he was quite extreme with me. So I would have to go to the backyard and pick up every cigarette butt between the patio things. Or I would have to go do this. And I would think of Saint Teresa — I’m not kidding — and say, just do every act as a prayer, which I could do for a while. Then my father would come out, and say, “You missed this one, this one, and this one.” And it was hard.
But it seems that everything in the Western world is trying to tell us this now, even as we’re speeding up, and speeding up, and speeding up, and staring into our screens. It hurts to be present, though. I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.
...
Ms. Tippett
What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?
Ms. Howe
Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.Ms. Tippett
Ms. Howe
It hurts us.
I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window any more when you’re married.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
“We cannot even imagine how huge our souls are, I think we both agree on this, but what if this is precisely because god is there in them ? Why do you want to see all you can of the world before your pigeon heart stops beating ? Why the want of everything new ? Is it maybe to uncover some corner of your spirit you haven’t met, but know sits waiting to be touched by the sun of your insight ?”
My friend, the Gull
I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.
Marie Howe
Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill oneself.
A Happy Death, Albert Camus
What fine weather today! Can't choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.
Anton Chekhov
“I sat silently at my desk, observing those around me like a cat. Sometimes my keen awareness of them was so intense it shamed me to think of it. All that distinguished me from a thief was that I was stealing nothing, I thought in self-disgust.”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney
I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn’t even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn’t talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.
Yiwei Chai
Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
“It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the colour of the wheat fields.”
Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, trans. Katherine Woods
Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
You many unassaulted cities:
Have you never yearned for the enemy?
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
Allow it all to happen: beauty and terror.
Just press on! No feeling is an error.
But don't get severed from me.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
I love the hours when I'm blue, depressed,
and my senses sharpened and I wide awake;
for then I have found, as in letters of late,
my future life lived out like stories
and lived out at bestThese hours give me assurance that I have
the room for a second, much fuller life.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.
Thomas Merton
There’s something strange and frightening, like God, which won’t let me die.
“Villon’s Wife,” Osamu Dazai, trans. Donald Keene
But what frightens me is that somewhere in the world there is a God. There is, isn’t there?
“Villon’s Wife,” Osamu Dazai, trans. Donald Keene
He had a theory… that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
[B]ecause you can no longer believe in God, who is everywhere present in it, then ask yourself, dear Mr Kappus, whether you have really lost God after all? Is it not rather the case that you have never yet possessed him? For when was it supposed to have been? Do you think a child can hold him, him whom grown men only bear with difficulty and whose weight bows down the old? Do you believe that anyone who really has him could lose him like a little pebble, or don’t you think that whoever had him could only be lost by him alone?
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he’d have to be a pretty peculiar type. I don’t know. He’d have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he’d been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. He’d have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn’t run over by a goddam truck before he ever even got his license to practice. He’d have to believe that it’s through the grace of God that he has the native intelligence to be able to help his goddam patients at all.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
You keep talking about ego... This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t. What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t!
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
Such beauty, you say
Let us stop & admire
A moment, a day
The fields & the fireGod the great spider
Has caught you again
"May," Tom Disch
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
Jeanette Winterson
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother's face,
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
"Scheherazade," Richard Siken
It was supposed to be a different life,
I kept reading about it.
I kept telling people I slept with
how soon we would know
(even as dread became daily)
exactly what to do with ourselves.
"May," Alex Dimitrov
When I had to walk the abject darkness, when I could not see an inch in front of me, I had nothing, and so I had to burn myself to make light. For that was the only way my cowardly self could walk forward. That light made me move forward, but also step back at the same time. As the light grew dimmer and dimmer the more I walked, I blamed myself, but by then I was all burnt up and nothing was left.
"To Orbit," Ha Sooyoung
The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
"Sheep in Fog," Sylvia Plath
Despair is a development of pride so great that it chooses one's certitude rather than admit God is more creative than we are.
First Reformed (2017)
“I was lonely. This was why I wrote letters: I hoped for a response.”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney
“In my heart, though, I was saddened that the person I loved and trusted most in the world could not understand me. But it’s within your power to help her understand, I thought, and yet you’re too cowardly to do so, and I grew still sadder.”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney
“Loving masculinity in a woman differs crucially in one way from loving it in a man: In her it is a badge of standing out, not of fitting in. It is grown into through pain, or at least a sense of separation from those less different.”
Carol A. Queen
In place of these incalculable losses, you would gain a sick, weak, unsociable, taciturn, gloomy, stiff, almost hopeless man who possibly has but one virtue, which is that he loves you.
Letters to Felice, Franz Kafka
“My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..."
Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, trans. Katherine Woods
“... the depths of love to which he had succumbed.”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney
You must let me
go first, Sue, because
I live in the Sea
always and know
the Road.
I would have drowned
twice to save
you sinking, dear,
If I could only
have covered your
Eyes so you wouldn't
have seen the Water.
Emily Dickinson
And he rose up, as if lifted by wings,
and his relief was tempting him
to consider himself a bird.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful.
“Litany for the Animals Who Run from Me,” Hieu Minh Nguyen
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird
“Good Bones,” Maggie Smith
That's funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air
“Funny,” Anna Kamieńska
He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance... After all it is no spring flower, only a postscript to hope.
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
How lightly we learn to hold hope,
as if it were an animal that could turn around
and bite your hand. And still we carry it
the way a mother would, carefully,
from one day to the next.
"Insha'Allah," Danusha Laméris
“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”
Vincent van Gogh
Basically only prayer exists;
our hands have been annoited for this
and nothing they made did not supplicate;
whether one painted or mowed
from the striving of each tool
did piety evolve.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
The desire to pray itself is a type of prayer. How often we ask for genuine experience when all we really want is emotion.
First Reformed (2017)
I’d like to be convinced—I’d love to be convinced—that you’re not using it as a substitute for doing whatever the hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty. Worse than that, though, I can’t see—I swear to God I can’t—how you can pray to a Jesus you don’t even understand. And what’s really inexcusable, considering that you’ve been funnel-fed on just about the same amount of religious philosophy that I have—what’s really inexcusable is that you don’t try to understand him. There’d be some excuse for it if you were either a very simple person, like the pilgrim, or a very goddam desperate person—but you’re not simple, buddy, and you’re not that damned desperate.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
You thought you could conclude your quest
once you had reaped the fruit,
but now the fruit turns wondrous
and you again are guest.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
[T]he only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment.. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
[I]t didn’t begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
The idea being that if you call out the name long enough and regularly enough and literally from the heart, sooner or later you’ll get an answer. Not exactly an answer. A response.
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure..
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
Just because I’m choosy about what I want—in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things—doesn’t mean I’m not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I’m more so!
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.”
Drawn and Quartered, Emil Cioran, trans. Richard Howard
“His sights were fixed on far higher things than mine, I’ll not deny it. But it is surely crippling to limp along, so out of step with the lofty gaze you insist on maintaining.”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney
You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
We know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Charlie Louth
For you alone the poets lock their doors
and gather pictures, rife and rich; emerge
much more matured by reams of metaphor
and still remain alone.
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.
Anaïs Nin
Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.
Thomas Mann
“Thanks to this grief, a touch of balm momentarily soothed my poor heart, which had been clenched tight around its fear and pain.”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney
My sadness is very adult. You can bring it to places
in public and it will not make a scene.
You will not be embarrassed by it.
Megan Fernandes
... for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to the earth.
“To Build a Fire,” Jack London
Wrong. Everything by which you have lived and are living is a lie, a fraud, concealing life and death from you.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
Understand that there is a beast within you
that can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.
Frank Bidart
Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.
Upstream: Selected Essays, Mary Oliver
in the land of mockers he will rise
and will be called a dreamer: for someone awake
will always be called a dreamer by the dazed
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
Send me into your desert lands
The Book of Hours, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder
It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
“On Self-Respect,” Joan Didion
I suppose I love this life,
in spite of my clenched fist.
Andrea Gibson
τυρὸς δ’ οὐ λείπει μ’ οὔτ’ ἐν θέρει οὔτ’ ἐν ὀπώρᾳ, οὐ χειμῶνος ἄκρω· But cheese does not abandon me, neither in summer nor in autumn, nor at the end of winter.
Theocritus
“From a worldly perspective, I was an absolute fool... From some more elevated viewpoint, perhaps I could be admired as pure and innocent.”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney
In recovery circles, I’ve heard this described as “going to the hardware store for oranges.” In this case, the hardware store is your parents and the oranges are the love and support you rightfully wish they could give you. Unfortunately, the hardware store simply doesn’t stock oranges. And we save ourselves a world of hurt when we learn to stop going to people for things they aren’t capable of giving us.
Emily McCombs
Then he said: "Meditate for three days longer, then if you fail to attain enlightenment, you had better kill yourself." On the second day the pupil was enlightened.
101 Zen Stories, transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. "You mayhave come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."
101 Zen Stories, transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps
Buddha told a parable in a sutra:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
101 Zen Stories, transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps
"Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa... What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that... Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
“... new white bones lying buried at my feet…”
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney