but when you come to live every day in the midst of absurdity, it is far less easy to behave respectfully to it.

"Chained is the Spring. The night-wind bold Blows over the hard earth; Time is not more confused and cold, Nor keeps more wintry mirth. "Yet blow, and roll the world about; Blow, Time—blow, winter's Wind! Through chinks of Time, heaven peepeth out, And Spring the frost behind."

What distressed me most—more even than my own folly—was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

Thou dreamest: on a rock thou art, High o'er the broken wave; Thou fallest with a fearful start But not into thy grave; For, waking in the morning's light, Thou smilest at the vanished night

Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul:

But, alas! it is like trying to reconstruct a forest out of broken branches and withered leaves.

You see this Fairy Land is full of oddities and all sorts of incredibly ridiculous things, which a man is compelled to meet and treat as real existences, although all the time he feels foolish for doing so.

Thou goest thine, and I go mine— Many ways we wend; Many days, and many ways, Ending in one end.

to nourish him for yet deeper insatiableness."