Spiritual Ballads

A Doxology on the Wisdom Books of the Bible

A monk meditating on a skeleton. Wat Thevarajunkhorn (Bangkok).

1.

Who knew the word of God could ring so true? My strength is built, and I am reborn out of the breath of spirit, made to walk my way as clay among the dust and ashes of the fallen angel (Satan—the opposer, the negating spirit of reality!)

—

I have drunk from the cup of wisdom.
I read the words of the heavenly host.
In Him I find my woes heard and tears dried.
In love of Him do I find hope for my weary days.
Praise God. Praise God. Bless this, our life,
And let all our friends be of merry mirth and joy.
Oh, sweet God, how I become like a child again
When I read Your words—those words which taught billions,
And which, in my present life, fill me with hope and love.
I love You, God, as I love my lover and as I love my friends,
And the more I sip from Your words, the more hope is restored to me.
Blessed be God. This life is fine, a gift, a good time—should we be,
In spirit and in hope, in duty and in action, in love and in thought,
With God.

2.

Inspired! Inspired! Praise God, I am inspired.
Though these words fall like chaff upon the ground,
When being culled from the prosperous wheat,
I find in them the truest honesty a heart can proclaim.

God Almighty! Most High! My Lord and Savior.
Look upon this dear sinner with delight.
Please pardon my errors. Make me whole in the face of God.
Give me strength. Give me power. Make me one who is worthy.
Allow me to enter into the grand gates of heaven as my soul yearns upward.

Let not my past faults be a trouble for your benevolence, my dear God.
Love me, O Lord, as I love you. Love me so that I may be strong for you.
All things pass away and fall to nothing so long as man lives.
With you in man’s heart, however, the race of Adam shall not enter oblivion.
No knowledge equals yours, and no wisdom of man hits your ears kindly.
From dust we come, and from dust we will return.

O Lord God, forgive a sinner who loves you dearly.
Turn not a blind eye to my good deeds, and cast not stones upon my evil whims.
I suffer for what I love, because what I love is evil compared with your love.
Lord God—mighty king of Earth, heaven, and the universe—make me steadfast.
Give me the resolve to do good to my fellow man. Make me like your Son!
The strength which I desire from you to endure this life of mine
Is, in your account of all things, very small; with such being the case,
Merciful Father, please—as a loving son—forgive me and give me strength.
Allow me the power to judge what is good for me and to turn from what is evil for me.

I only want to do good for the world. I want happiness upon Earth, for your glorification.
In your name do I beseech you. Lord God, our Father—my holy Father—please give me strength to endure this life.
This life of mine, which is but a shadow in the sun,
And fades just as quickly as the darkness of night overshadows the whole world.
Leave me not to fend for myself in all my ignorance, in so much inequity, in so much sin.

Lord God, love is all I have for you. All I do is for your sake.
Let not my wisdom perish from the minds of men who seek what I seek.
Give us seekers of your truth the highest place in heaven.
All that we labor for—all on your behalf—let us have a share in heaven.
Allow your spirit to enter into me, so that I may speak your wisdom for all mankind to hear.

Dear God, Father most high and beloved by me, hear the words of a confessor.
Please, Father, give me your passion, your sacrifice, your suffering, your life!
The shadow of the material world holds my interest no longer.
I want unity in you.
I want love from you.
I want faith in you.
I want courage from you.

Lord God, allow my capacities—born from your guiding hands and benevolent nature—to flourish under the sun.
Let not all my knowledge come to naught. Allow my words to be heard by all mankind.
Dear God—God, my God, O my God—my God, save me from myself.
No longer do I wish to be led astray by the world. My soul seems destined to be with you and you alone.
In you, Father, do I find my salvation. Like Job, do I praise and thank you.
Like Job, do I suffer, and like him do I keep my faith in you.
You, O God, grant me wisdom—more than I have from you already—and give me a sweet tongue,
In order that all I whisper in the ears of men may be taken to heart and loved by them, for your sake!

God, O God, my holy, holy God—give this sinner the power to endure life;
And give this sorrowful child (in your eyes) courage to no longer seem like a child in the world.
All I wish, I wish on your behalf, in order that my life may not seem hateful toward you.
In your love do I seek to make my vision. I want only mirth and blessed peace in life.
I want happiness for all mankind, and I want the pain of misery to seem like pleasure.
I want no misery born in me, nor in any relation of mine. Dear God, most high.
Know I forsake you not, curse not your name, use your name—never in vain—
And only do I seek your love and mercy.

What man walks perfectly upon this Earth?
Who can claim true happiness and freedom from strife, sin, or suffering?
Has there ever been a man equal to you?
Never has there been—not one, not ever!
With this admitted and taken into our hearts, dear God—
Hear my cries! Let not these tears fall silent upon the ground, left to nourish nothing, not even dirt.
Though my fate is with the worms underground in body,
In soul I find myself in unity with you—you, my Father, most high.

Do my words have power? Does what I say make sense in your presence?
Only if I have your spirit within me. O dearest God, I love you.
Love me and forgive me; hold and endure me whilst I yearn for more with you.
The present holds little for such a soul as mine; but in the future, in your kingdom—that is where my salvation finds itself whole.

Let all I say be like wind upon the sea, like foam bubbling forth from a raging ocean—
To boil and boil, and simmer to nothing but a little smoke and a slight overflowing of vanity and emptiness.
These words which I speak were already born in you, known since the beginning—for you know all things and are most high.

Lord my God, seeing in your spirit and your works the majesty of your power, I have come to believe in what you are.
I now only demand that you instill in me resolve to make my love for you stronger than what at present seems possible for me.
I have never not loved you; only have I ever been led temporarily astray, but never have I been without you in my heart.

Dear Lord God, my God, my God—holy Father of all under heaven—
Give this loving sinner of yours the confidence necessary to do your works.
Afford me the wisdom of Solomon—but unlike him, give me the love of knowledge without its sorrow, without its vanity, without its absurdity, without its emptiness.
Come unto me, O God, and let me, in spirit, see you in whole; and allow my face, like Moses’s, to shine with light and wisdom.

God, greatest glory and merciful Father of all that walks and crawls upon the Earth,
Give your child a desire to love you more than is humanly possible.
Allow me to pray more firmly in faith. Give me strength to endure the nightmare of so much darkness which I find my mind presently in.

As I walk upon the dirt, and let my tears run from my face upon the soil,
Allow such dew to form upon the face of Earth, and sprout up trees of glory and wisdom.
Knowledge, courage, compassion, hope, faith, and love!
Perform your great works that endow man with these qualities, and bless them unto me, O Lord.

God most high and blessed, let me not go silently into that dark night, without the light of your illumination.
Show me the way and give me the strength to carry on these works of yours on Earth.
I ask—if I may be allowed one more wish from you—this and nothing more:
Love me as I love you; in your power do I seek faith, in order that the ways of the world may not cause me to sway or falter in your ways.
Allow me this, dear God, and I shall exalt the world in your name and grace.
Dearest Lord God! Bless me, in order that I may bless you.
I love you, God. I love you.

3.

Out of the night do we come into the light.
In great inspiration do our words strike us like hammer blows upon the head.
Oh, most high Father, these words of praise are for you.

Forgive us our sins. Forgive me my sins. Forgive my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, and all the people under heaven.
Forgive us as we forgive those who pass judgment against us.

Let not all our praises for you fall only upon the wind.
Uplift us, hear us, heal us, preserve us—in the end, love us.
Though our works be small, and our sins large, love us anyway.

Dear God, afford those who love you the strength to endure their troubles.
The troubles of life come unto us like heat unto the flame.
Let us not burn and run about in pain.

Dear God, Lord God, most high—give me the spirit of life, the breath of wisdom, the spell of abundance.
Give me the wisdom to see what I know in my heart.
Allow me to look evil in the face with courage, and harden my heart against the sins of the world totally.
Forgive this sinner, look gently upon him, and give his words the strength to impress you, in order that you may love him.

Lord God, love me as I love you, and you shall have love in me eternally.
If only I had more time on this Earth to love you more fully and carry out your works properly.
Alas, dear Christ, O God—time flies from us, and with it our lives;
Into darkness we descend, and in the fire we shall be cast lest we hold in faith and find love in you.

Highest Lord, mighty God, I love you as I love myself;
And in that faith let me hold fast to what is good, hold far from what is evil, and love what is uncertain.
In belief do I find you, and in your Son do I find salvation.

Lord God, give me the knowledge to find the words to glorify you;
After that, the wisdom to sanctify you;
And lastly, the power to sustain my love for you amidst the evils of life.
You test me constantly as you do everyone, but in you do I find all I wish to say—all I want to say, have yet to say, will say, and will die before I say.

Dear God, you are the most high, greatest of all time—above time, in fact—
And in that do we who love you rejoice in our eternity.
In faith do we find you, in you do we find love, and in your love do we find life.
That is our life: love in you, faith in you, goodness done for you, and hope found in you.
Love me, God, as I love you, and you shall have the strongest soldier in faith.
That is my greatest wish.

4.

Constantly set I am against the time of life,
I find in this shortness the quickest way to salvation.

In God, most merciful, most high, there lies all that is greatest in the conception of man.
In you do I find all my thoughts; all my wishes and desires are known to you before I speak them from my own heart.

Oh, dearest, most lovely God, in you is all I seek.
What are all my strivings on Earth but the vain ambitions of a little man in the end?
I shall, like all before me, go out from this wicked life not knowing what I was or who I am,
But in the thought of you, I am restored to hope, and find that I no longer stutter in the mind.

All my inspiration flows, and I have wisdom unknown to any man but the prophets and those who love you.
In you I find love, and in that I never tire of repeating the truth;
For the truth is a glorious thing, and in language do I unveil its mysteries—in order that I may more appropriately comprehend what this life is that you have made for me, God.
There is none able to know all, and no genius great enough to overcome the hidden aspects which only angels and blessed men can see.

In you, God, God, O my God—I love you, I endure for you, and, empowered by you, become one with you.
I endure and proclaim my love whilst under pressure from so much suffering and oppression.
But this life is to be passed through without much concern.
Whilst we live, though, let us be of good cheer, much hope, strong faith, and unwavering love.

Though the life of man is like a shadow, which fades as soon as the glory (brightness) of God shines upon it—
For in our insignificance do we truly see what we are—
The thought of you, and the love we have for you,
Makes all shadows lengthen and quicken to the horizon.

Dearest and greatest God, what power you have, and how strong we become at the thought of you.
Lord most high, let me never stop writing your praise.
Always afford me the strength of body and peace of mind to write what my soul feels but which my words scarcely touch.

Who is bold enough to claim they believe in God?
Only those with the power of God in them;
Those who have seen and known God—
Not in mind through reason,
But in love and experience.

The heart knows all, and in love are we saved by you, dear God.

5.

Few things trouble a man more than his coming demise.
The end of all things in life seems the end of Earth itself.
Though we be but dust in the eyes of God,
O great God, hear our words and praise our deeds done for you;
Your love is great and knows the extent to which all our actions are bent;
In you we find sweet repose in high, conjured salvation:
The thought of love in you—the love we feel toward you and all things outside you on account of you—
Rises our spirits to the seventh heaven, and we are transported, as it were,
To a happier state than we thought after our stay in this world.
The world to come: that seems the happier state for all men.

Oh, how shallow do all my words sound when spoken aloud to none but myself and God;
But you, dear God, are listening to my heartfelt pleas, laments, and worries which are nigh and ever-present.
Who isn’t encouraged by your love?
In thinking of you, am I not met with the same encouragement
As when I think of my dearest love, or my best friends, or my family?
God most high, only in you do I find my thoughts coming to me without hesitation.

In my reflection of you, I am reflecting only what is best in myself—
Out of myself do I go, and into myself do I return when in the thought of you.
All is made clear and light. I worry not at the highest or lowest, the nearest or the farthest, the dearest or most obscure.
At once do I find power in my words, and I obtain a contentment within myself nowhere else to be had in all my activities upon this Earth.

O blessed God, Father most high and lovable—
I love you as you love your children, and I want only to serve and preserve my faith in you.
Greatest glory of all time, God, my Father, who is in heaven—
Bless me as I bless you.
Love me as I love you.
Forget me not as I forget not my wickedness in this life.
Let my words soar like clouds swimming upon the air;
Let not my gentle teardrops fall to Earth void of significance.
Allow me to say only what is true from the heart, and my heart shall be yours more than you already have it.

I love you, God. Love me, so that I may love you more.
Your faithful servant and repentant sinner.

6.

Such troubles are all our lives are met with.
We, mankind, descendants of Adam, know no time in which
What we labor for doesn’t continue to pain us, and the longer must we work and labor for the same each passing day.

It is a hard thing to live when man seems so far disconnected from his nature.
God knows all, though, and in him are all we suffer for made light in how empty and vain they are in comparison to him.
What is the Earth but a miserable pile of bones at the end of it anyway?

God, you who know all that is to come, to pass, and will be—
Give us the greatest strength to find all these labors no problem for us.
Lead us into the light of your love, and in your love allow us to remain faithful toward you.
Let every man seeking you find happiness in his conception of you.

Never shall the faithful be led astray so long as the one who is faithful maintains faith through love.
The beginning of all wisdom is fear of you, and so, let us all know fear as the first fruit of knowledge.
Do not all the trees of Earth which bear fruit have your stamp upon them?
Does not every beautiful thing which walks upon the surface of the rock have its origin in your love?

I have known all my life that you exist, not because I saw you, but because I felt you.
Most high and loving God, please, with all the mercy you show, offer me forgiveness, in order that I may never turn away from you.
Save me, in order that I may save my fellow sinners.
Give me the strength of mind to find in the simplicity of nature what you are;
And in that let my words and language sound like honey to the tongue.
I only ever want to praise you, and in doing so bring myself and others closer to you.

It would be my greatest joy to bring mankind closer to you, and in doing that find a place within your vast kingdom in order that I may continue to do your works in the afterlife like an angel.
Whilst I walk upon the Earth, however—dearest Father and greatest good—allow my spirit to flow swiftly and overtake the whole world in bold strides;
Let what I have to say resound across the atmosphere, and bounce atop the highest peaks of the sky, so that the word gets across, and so that all may one day find themselves in you.
Give me wisdom and give me strength. Give me truth and breathe the spirit in me in order that I may speak the truth without stutter or hesitation.

I love you, God.

7.

We are made of stuff built upon mysteries,
And set up by hands which no man can fathom.
The more I contemplate the origin of me,
The more I see just how inadequate the mind of man is;
The more one tries to comprehend the shortness and vanity of existence,
The more one turns to God, and the more one wishes to be one with Him.
The more one sees of this world, the more one is endeared to God—
For this world is a great vanity, made for the wicked and damned.
Hell is full, and all the devils are here upon Earth already.

My knowledge extends only so far as the light of God allows me to see into the darkness of my being.
There is no mind bright enough to eclipse the benevolent light that is the shining of God upon the globe.
And though those beams of light reflect off the shallow and empty-hearted,
There are those steadfast lovers of the Lord who only seek union and serenity.
I too, God, am such a man.
Oh, my God, dearest and most high Father;
Allow me, your child, to run freely into life without worry or fear;
Let me roam as a child does the forest of his childhood;
Let no wickedness enter my heart, and keep me at a distance from those who would seek to corrupt me.
Give me the power to overcome. Endear me to you with your strength by endowing me with those things which few mortals possess, but which all wish they had in abundance: judgment and wisdom.

I only seek those things on Earth which are of benefit to the whole of mankind.
To act only for myself would be to go against what you told us:
To love all people like yourself, like a friend, like a lover.
We are all children of your grace, and in that do we seek love.

Holy be thy name—great God and Father of all things under heaven—
Let me see into myself, in order that enlightenment may allow me to glorify your name more than I can at present.
I only desire wisdom without suffering.
Let all other things pass before my eyes like trifles comparable with the wind upon the sea.
Praise, praise, praise, sanctify and restrain evilness—day of wrath, come not for us, but for those who sin against us.

8.

There is no end to the extent to which man strives after his salvation.
All we do upon this Earth is but for that end in mind.

Oh, dearest God, you make the road shake and shatter with your godly presence.
Your power is great, and man knows nothing of it but feels all of it.
We, in vain, strive to understand what you are, but in trying to capture you in the mind,
All we do is confuse ourselves severely, and in our reason also turn ourselves to the Devil, for in him are all the corrupting ways of the passions of man.

Man is constantly in need of saving.
His salvation is anything but fixed,
And his mind will never find comfort so long as he is made only for things of this Earth.

Man who is wicked, turn against your pride, and enter into the house of God with praise and teary eyes.
No man, in the glory of God that is, can claim himself to be the better of He who created us all.

Oh, dearest Father, strongest being, lend me your strength, in order that my spirit shall flourish and grow under your power.
The influence upon man by all things in nature indicates the clearest sign that the majesty of heaven rings out across the Earth.
I love all things that are in God, and have a deep distrust for those things which claim to move beyond God.

No word, nor act, nor insight, nor master of knowledge will ever be capable of comprehending the variety of experiences which come to make up the nature of God in man.
All phenomenological nonsense as far as I’m concerned.
The only truth to God is that sense which I know to be the case as I read His words;
As I begin to have feelings for the things of this Earth, I grow both distant and attached.
I want nothing but the best for all I love, but, knowing the ways of man—along with the transitoriness of all human things—
I can only consign it all to the flames, and leave myself with nothing left but faith and a desire to love those things which, without which, there would be no faith at all.
In order to come to reason, I must first believe—and in that do I place all my love and faith in the Father of all Fathers, the King of kings, the most high and almighty!

9.

What strength is required by man in order to endure the misery of life.
There is no strength possible on this Earth suitable enough for a man who wishes to overcome his sin.
Only in God are we saved from those forces of evil which make us do wrong to ourselves.

We are always in the wrong with respect to God, not because He is God, but because He is our Father.
The Holy One, most high, most loving and caring: forgive us our sins, and make each of us see the error of our ways.

No man deserves to live in this world without knowing your love.
The world is cast in darkness the moment life is torn from your loving light.
God, savior, creator, and benefactor of man’s deeds, please remember us as we cry in vain out to you in our trying times.

Man’s patience is limited to what he has endured before, and how well his circumstances are now.
It is not possible for a man to see beyond himself so long as he is made to view himself in the absence of God.
What is this life we live but one long battle with losing love towards God as His world hardens us towards Him?

God tests all His creatures, and His strongest servants most of all;
For in the shortness of life do struggles appear that much more troubling,
But so much stronger, too, must man become in the endurance of that which is utterly abhorrent and troubling to his nature.

Man has but one nature, and that is God’s nature implanted in him;
From here do we receive the grace of love from God, and in that do we find wisdom and hope.
Find hope and love wisdom.
Let that be the only thing a man strives after whilst he walks upon the Earth.
Everything else is but an illusion.

10.

What comes upon our paths are the ways of vanity and death.
Man knows no things but that which God gives him.
What little life we have, and what large debts we carry as we live.
The long trouble of life—of fear and trembling upon the steps of the Lord—
Is hard and arduous, but man sustains and faith maintains, so long as the love of God is in the heart.
This world knows none truly happy, and those who sing and drink away their sorrows find nothing in that but emptiness.

God, greatest King of kings, save man from all his vileness.
Lead us not into the desires of the flesh,
Preserve us from those ways which destroy our mind,
Save all from their evilness,
And above all grant those who love you the power to maintain their love in you.

Faith—mighty power which moves mountains—make us whole;
Show us all the absurdities of the world, and at their sight shall we laugh and rejoice in our knowledge of the pure and good.
Allow those who seek to know, and those who know to love.
As the eyes are for seeing, so too is the heart for loving.
The mind must be clear of all vanity, and empty itself into the stream of sterility.

Glorious God, our Father who art in heaven, give us this day, in order that we may see the night without fear of darkness.
Cast us not from your side, and allow man to never falter in his love for you.
Give us contentment, that we may seek not in trouble but in tranquility and bliss.
Though my words can never capture the glory of your goodness, your holiness, your benevolence, your omnipotence—your everything—
Great God, allow my sense to come to you, and in you find the words necessary for my hope and salvation.

11.

Of what little good exists in this world, we have God to thank.
Preserve us, dear Lord, and reach out to us in our iniquity,
In order that in our moments of hesitation and sin, we may be saved
Through the light of your goodness and the benevolence of your motives.

What does man truly have to himself while he is doomed to waste his days away upon the Earth,
Gathering and laboring for himself, away from you in spirit and troubled in mind?
There are few moments of pleasure in life worthy of God’s favor.
The facts of man come unto him in his last days,
And on his bed of death doth he cry out to the Lord for saving.

The ways of all men find themselves away from God,
And only in God do any of his actions have meaning in the end.
What are all my words but wind in the end?
All my knowledge is vanity in the face of death, and all my hope crumbles to the ground if its foundation is not in faith.
I must seek myself in God, and through God must I come to the truth of myself.
The song of myself is that which I sing only in the presence of God.

Oh, misery, suffering, suffer me for a little longer,
In order that God may see my pain for longer,
And in my pain may He know what true faith I have in Him.

This world is like sticks bundled and burnt in the furnace of life,
Left to ash, and carried off by the wind.
That is our life, but from the ashes do we rise like a phoenix with the touch of God.

Oh, praise God—our holy Father and creator. Blessed be His ways.
Blessed are those who suffer and yet still love. Those who believe but do not see.
The holiest are only holy through faith; and faith breaks doubt, and collects the pieces in a pan, to be tossed and swept aside into the land of no man’s.
Preserve us from this, dear Father, and let us come to you whole, and love you in unity.

Praise God, King of kings.

12.

I wander far and wide and seek all things of this world,
In order that I may do glory and justice to the Holy One above.
I know the vanity in my desires, but I cannot feel any other way towards God but in love for Him.
I only seek that which preserves my strength, maintains my faith, and restores my hope whilst I live on this Earth.
I seek that which is powerful, in order that I may breathe in the air of the mighty.
Nowhere else do I seek myself but in the fullness of God.

Holy Lord, hold me dear; let me not go out into the world before knowing your truth.
Restore to me those powers which age has taken from me,
And give me the passion to see the world again in a new light—through your light.
Where does the vanity of man end? What direction does iniquity cast its glance, and who shall know the movements of its trickery?
Everywhere do I feel hopeless when not with God in my heart.
The world, in its vast magnitude, paralyzes this servant with fear.

Holy God, know my pain, see my suffering, and breathe into me your spirit.
Give me the strength to do your works faithfully, in your faith, for your love.
Dear Father, holy God, do not cover yourself from me in clouds of light;
May my eyes see your radiance and power, and may I be amazed at the sight, and may I—from that sight—be encouraged to action.
Rouse the soul in me to a frenzy, and make it dance in order that I may no longer know the color of fear, so that I may do what I must for your sake.

Great God—highest of the high, greatest of the great—hear a sinner in repentance, and cast your glorious glance upon him;
Save me from myself, and dispel all confusion and fear and trembling from my heart.
Let me worship at your altar.
Give me the light of day to illuminate my wayward path, and drive the night of the world out.

13.

Oh me, oh life, do I suffer on your behalf in order to live.
Wretched are the ways of man, and troubled are his days eternally.
What little life we have, we spread it out across our days and months,
Forgetting the sense of that which lies above, and in forgetting come unto sin as the lover does his mistress.

Oh, wretched life, so long endured, so little preserved, so far from God, so little hope in future hopes.
All our ways speak of the evil we do, and no man is capable of overcoming himself so long as his faith is shattered upon the rocks of the seafloor,
And when the crags of the Earth come up to swallow whole ships, and leave the crewmen to cast about adrift at sea with nothing but planks and driftwood,
There the troubles of man are made a good analogy, and instantly do all hopeful men despair.

But oh, holy God, greatest of all creation; let us not taste the fortune of misery which so often showers the Earth.
Let no man who loves you taste suffering. Save us from our own desire to be free from that which pains us.

Dear God, do you not see us and hear us: our cries, wails, pleas, and lamentations?
Oh, glorious Father up in heaven, should this suffering mean little to you?
Perhaps, for all the things of man are like a grain of sand compared to the sea;
But still, oh Lord, give us the strength to endure these harrowing truths.
Our lives are laborious things, and all that eases us only aids us in our love for you.
Dearest Christ, mighty Father, save us, love us, and we shall love you as you save us.

14.

Man is but a walking corpse.
All he strives for while he lives leaves him for naught.
Vain ambitions and confused paths taken whilst following a foreign light not our own.
Those are the ways of man: confused, downcast, alienated, isolated, scattered, and utterly hopeless.

Nowhere will man ever find what he seeks, unless he seeks in faith for truth, and has God in his heart whilst doing so.
Oh, what are all my woes and cries in this world compared with the knowledge of God.
Should His creation even be worthy of His love? I truly do wonder sometimes.
For what does man not do to provoke a second flood?

Woe, woe, and misery are our lot.
Born into a world of darkness, so too shall we reenter that world at death.
Sorrowful state, hateful life, terrible misery, intolerable pain, loveless relations—all these things are near to my heart, and I have not the strength to cast them away.
Oh Lord, holy God, Father in heaven—your child calls out to you like an infant does its mother.

Behold me, in all my suffering, and restore me to that once-known youth, in order that I may find all these pangs of misery not so burdensome.
Wretched are the ways of man, and confused are his notions of what is good, and how often he chooses evil.

Hateful am I towards myself. What sadness do I bring upon myself;
Oh Lord God, Father up high,
Offer me your strength,
Give me strength,
Save me from evil,
Extinguish all my darkness with your light,
And like the wick of a candle let me burn slowly,
And like the flame let me flow with the passing breeze.

Father most high, give me the wisdom necessary to live well, in order that I may find the words for your praise,
And in praising you let me find strength, hope, love, and salvation.

15.

Wise are the ways of man only so far as his sin is concerned.
There is little by which to save a man in this life.
All things are in flux, and no rock can be found for a foundation
Unless that very rock be the immovable faith of man in God Almighty.

Praise God, praise the Highest; dearest God, look down on us in mercy, and save us from our ways of wickedness.
There will never be enough words by which to shout your praise.
Like the angels of heaven—Holy! Holy! Holy!—holy is the only word which I can utter, forever and ever.

Dearest God, most high and blessed, whence comes all this inspiration?
Whither shall my wisdom flow, and wherefrom shall it pass?
Oh, what confusion this world is. What man lives long enough to see himself in the mirror for the first time?
When the soul is reflected, what is presented to man but that which he knows to be wrong, but which he affirms anyway.

Endless are the delights of life; forever are the pains that follow it—
Like a shadow cast upon the floor, though there be no light;
So powerful is the evil of this world that it can even cast shadows in the dark.
To darkness do all the paths of wisdom lead us.
To death are we hurrying onwards, forwards, faster and faster with each passing second.

Woeful life! Teary eyes—grace not the ground with hurtful shame; there is nothing shameful in your wickedness,
So long as God is held to, for He knows all, and forgives all.
However, see to it that you see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
None of the wretched ways of life are prevented from us.
Always shall they be present, and offer themselves up to us seductively, like a beautiful lady of the night.
We must cast out this most alluring of phantoms through our own light,
And in our faith, too, shall we shine our own light out towards the world,
Illuminating all things that we give our glance towards.

Oh, holy Father, may I never stop loving you, may I always praise you, and may I always have my wits about me to speak your deeds, your love for us, and our eternal salvation in you.

16.

The vanity of the world is the vanity of man.
The vanity of life is the vanity in man.
So many ways to say repeatedly the same.
Man the miserable, man the unfortunate, man the rational beast.

The seed of Adam—holy steward of Earth, guardian and protector, fruitful begetter of children;
All this, yea, and creator of misery, misfortune, and suffering. Man knows what is bad, and chooses what is bad;
The good is only a reflection that disappears like mist with the breaking of dawn.

The sun casts light on all things under heaven, and in its light do we find hope.
The life of man is short and laborious, and yet, man lives!
Whence comes this faith?
God, God, God, oh, holy Father God, the greatest God, the one God, the only God.
Praise be to God, holy Father, holiest of holy beings.

Love us, dearest God, as we love you; and in your love do we grow dear to you, and in you do we find our hope for life.

Faith is tied to man like his skin to his face. The more we tear at it, the uglier we become.
Let us never lose faith. Let us always find you in our hearts.
Dearest God, your love is what we live for.
Shower us in delight, in order that we may praise you more highly than our hearts already do.
Give us the strength to endure this life.
May we see life as it truly is and not be frightened by it.
Still our resolve, and give us faith, led by your light, never to temptation but delight.

Praise God, most high—we love you, God, we love you.
Our hearts bleed for you, and we only yearn for your infinite love in us.
Amen.

17.

Man chases after phantoms of happiness like a dog does its tail.
Oh, how silly man is, to take delight in this life—as if there were anything worth smiling over in this world, where all is destined to doom, decay, and death.
What is oblivion but the swallowing up of all things into the dark nothingness from which they all came, and towards which they are moving at every moment?

Oh, what a life, what a short stay we have. Walking we are, doing and laboring, procreating and begetting offspring for the future—
All this for what, though? To what does man do anything, if meaning is found nowhere but in faith—strong conviction in our holy Father?
God, most high and blessed, make me dear to the Earth, allow me to love life, give me the courage to seek not just your faith but faith in man.
Make my tongue say wise things as your spirit is spoken outwardly by me.

I have sought far and wide for knowledge that may enlighten my path, but no enlightenment has ever truly lasted long for me;
The more I held out faith in myself, the further I found myself from you, and the more meaningless did all my words and cries become.
There is nothing for me on this Earth any longer, dear God.
My lament is that I live at all.
Must I find myself as others do, happy and living for the sake of sustaining their burden?
I wish I’d never been born.
I feel as if I do not belong to the race of men.
So much foolishness and hate do I see from all of them;
And yet, on account of the general happiness, must I tragically go forwards anyway;
All this must I show my care for, though in my heart I have no love for anything but my dearest love and you, oh God.

Sustain me, Lord. Allow my pleas to be heard by all.
Give me the strength to live as others do. Allow me to see the world foolishly, and let me find happiness in my plight, in my misery, in my very misfortune, where I must live for no other purpose but to live.
That is the greatest misfortune of life—it has always been meaningless and pointless without faith in you.
I believe in you not because I know you, but because in the thought of you do the burdens of my life seem like absolutely nothing—in the same way my own life is absolutely nothing.

Dearest God, you see what I now mean? Do my words now sound with wisdom about them?
I believe they do, at least for me.
I find in my love for you the truest expression of what life really is:
A vast nothingness in which we labor merely because we exist at all.
All this experience seems so trite when I consider it in the context of my love for you.
That is why I love you, God! To love you is to hate everything wicked in this life;
And because all things in life are wicked compared to you, to love you is to truly love life.

18.

The light of day shines brightly, but scarcely on man, it seems.
Oh, to be a preacher of doom and decay.
To tell all of the coming blackness which so powerfully moves us and causes us fear.
What a life we live. What days we sustain and maintain. Under so much stress do we labor for life.

Never is man satisfied with anything he ever does.
No wisdom, even the highest, seems good enough for man.
Even if you, dear God, blessed man himself, he would still cry out for more wisdom;
Foolishly thinking that your wisdom will ever be comprehended by him in full.

Impossible are the ways of the Lord for man to understand,
In much the same way man does not understand himself,
And the more he introspects, the more he finds the truth of that revealed in his shallowness.
Man is totally shallow, and never will we have enough grace, composure, elegance, turn of phrase, and, in general, oratorical skill to display his heart fully to the world.

Oh, wretched is this life—
God, sustain us in these times of misery; make us dear to you, and give us the strength necessary to find the words which speak your truth.

I cannot help but feel totally lost when I step out into the world, filled with so many men ignorant of God, and even hateful and spiteful towards God.
Father most high, allow me to forgive them as you forgive them; and give me the courage to enter into discourse with them, so that my words may not lead them astray but into the path of light.

How confusing everything not related to man’s heart is.
This world is a mystery shadowed in darkness, which no man can ever know fully,
Which is why no secret of the world is in fear of being revealed—
For whatever is revealed is only done so thanks to God.

Oh, holy Father, blessed is He who made and sustains us.
Love—that is what you are, God.
Love in you, faith in you, and belief in you. God bless all.

19.

Words fail, but life sustains.
Oh, and how confused that contradiction makes man.
All that we love is confused, for in our loving it, we do not know why we love.
To ask a why of love is to make a demand which only God can fulfill.

Wretched life, wedded as we are to what is wicked, we move through the glory of the day as if it were night,
And the more we cling to that which is foreign to us, the further we grow from ourselves and God.

No wisdom of man is equal to the glory and brightness which God so effortlessly casts upon the whole cosmos.
The heavens, and even the stars, are outshone by His glorious light,
And further do we fall into love the more we see His works in nature.
But our minds are downcast, and far away do we seem from God, though we have every fortune in this life presently.

Not even a poet could find the words necessary to coat experience with meaning.
All that we say or do is but a reflection of what we want, but not what God commands us to do.
Everything is confused and thrown into a chaos of disorder and dissonance;
The music of the trees sings beautifully in the wind,
But what do these harmonies mean to us when our mind is upon the wicked, and constantly having stones cast upon it—as if we were supposed to stone our souls to death!

I do not know whence I come, where I go, or even why I live—
But I know this much:
I love God.
I love my family, my friends, my dearest love, and all that is good in this world.
Only for those things do I live; only for the benefit of those things which give me life do I live at all.

My love for love itself is strong, for God is love—God is life: for in Him we were given form, shaped and molded, breathed into, and animated perpetually afterward.

Man is a perpetually moving force of love, inhabited in a bag of bones and sinews—our flesh flies apart at the seams as we die, but in death do we awaken to our true life.

Ah, how hard this life seems—to endure so much which we cannot stand in our hearts, but which we must endure if love is to be sustained.

That is the tragedy of life: that we must live in the face of choosing between things that are meaningful.

Woe be upon those who see this in full. Oh, how woeful it is to know things at all.
Better is the man who lives only for his health and family.
That man has a rock he overcomes the world with.
We men of knowledge are the most wretched creatures of Earth—
For like Solomon we see all things as vanity, and know them before they even come into being.

What is every child born but a little bundle of God’s creation which, in due time, must sadly follow the fate of its parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.

Woeful life, hopeful death—alas, however, not yet; ring not the bell yet, dearest death.
Give me strength, oh God, to overcome my own temporariness,
In order that I may do Your works, and spread the good news around,
And have love, in the end, abound!

20.

So dear is life to us that we endure it and sustain our faith in it.
Oh, what a glorious thing all this misery is!
How far we travel and look upon the sky with great joy and hope.
The sun restores my life, and in that do I find God.
In the world of creation, I see the works of God everywhere;
And in these works is my faith maintained, never to be overcome by any wickedness in this life.

Strong is the man who knows what God has in store for him.
The nature of my present life is such that I am close to God but far from the world, and in this do I suffer.
I find contradiction all around me, and the more I look into the confusion of the world,
The more I see how lifeless it all seems.
Oh, what endless misery all this glory now is to me!
My heart is overcome by a dark shadow, and all my love for life has vanished, without a trace of it ever having been so.

Thus, however, do I see the light again, and in that do I sing the praises of the Most High, our Lord, God, greatest and most powerful of all things above the heavens.
Yea, God is above life itself, for He is the source of life; but in Him is life eternal, and in our connection with Him do we find what is good for us and dear to all.

How I wish I had the wisdom to speak of all these things with more conviction than my heart already allows for.
I am but a poor translator of all things that enter my heart;
For the language of love is very confused, and is never able to find expression but in action or in deep reflections—reflections which most cannot carry out, for they are far from what love truly is and know not where to look in order to find God.

We find God in our hearts. That is where we must always turn—and the longer we do not, the further we break away from Him.

21.

How far we call out to wisdom, and find all wanting—should we even find it. And how small is its lot when we actually do manage to cast our gaze upon it. Fixed as we are in what our sights wish to see, we lose all surrounding color and find in the turbidity of reality nothing short of a watercolor that has been drenched.

Oh, wretched are the days of man: short is his life, long are his years, and hollow are his ambitions. I can never speak enough to praise the glory of God—to give His works their due respect. And whilst I suffer in my love, I still hold my faith with steadfast conviction and desire only love for those things which restore my spirits.

In my soul do I find what little morsel of wisdom I do hold, and from that do I feed and devour as wholly as I can. Oh, holy is the Lord, and strong is His power to inspire. I am inspired by the Lord, and I only wish to write out hymns in praise of Him.

Lord—Lord of lords—give me strength to endure this wretched place I reside in presently, in order that I may, in the future, do your works more appropriately, and so that I may finally enter the world without fear of what confusion and upheaval every ignorant savage presently walking loves to toss everything into.

In awe, I am, at the sight of so much suffering and wickedness cast by every glance and downtrodden look by every human being alive! Ah, what awe, what power, what sadness in the countenance of everybody I see around me. This is all too much. The world is too much with us, and in laboring do I find I only labor for myself, and wholly selfishly.

I hate all this and turn myself toward the dark in such moments of realization; but then, God, with your graceful hand, you show me that all is not for naught, and in you do I find comfort. The thought of you restores me to my powers, and at once do all my mental faculties return to me. I can now give you praise, while also giving praise to all the wickedness that this world is surrounded by—as old as the hills, and as long as the day is bright.

What evil. What goodness. How great is man? To choose between the good and evil! Nay, to move beyond them—that is surely the highest wisdom of all.

Praise the Lord!
Amen!

22.

Is there anything in man that can truly sustain his happiness? What on earth could possibly hold back the unrelenting torments that this world constantly confronts us with? What thing, if any, can possibly lighten the burden of man and make him grow dear to all his labors?

God! God is the answer. All answers rest in God, for in God is all our misery and all our joy. He marks our paths, notes our faults, and sees our every deed without forgetting them. Nowhere is man safe from the watchful eye of God, for all things we do are known to Him; and even our thoughts—though they be not embodied actions that cause our movements—are known to Him intimately, and recalled by Him even better than by us. Endless is the joy, forever is the sorrow afterward.

Oh, wretched existence. How dear I am to you, how much I find God in you; and yet, of all that I come to know in you, I am fated to lose you and quickly forget my whole being and everything I loved dearly in that being.

I can only speak what my heart feels. The poet is one who speaks with fluency what inspiration gives them; all have this, but only poets can bring it into reflection. All the world is reflected in the desires of the poet. The words of the wise ones seem lesser than those of the one who feels before they speak. That is the greatest treatment of language—to make it sweet, like honey, and to prolong its ecstasy by varying it and casting it upon every subject under the dominion of man’s reason.

God gives reason, as He gives life, and can just as quickly deprive us of it. Learn not pride from all that wisdom—for wisdom is nothing to be proud of, and in fact is not even a thing to really desire, as it fades when we die and is forgotten by the lesser who claim to be wise.

Oh, lamentable life—no scholar, no second Solomon, can make these attempts to capture life in a snare any easier. I am forever doomed to lament and praise God whilst tears stream down my face like a violent storm. Ah! All this imagery, this colorful language—as purple as Hell is red and yellow with fire—what does it matter to man in the end? I venture to say very little.

God, send down your dearest angel, and have them gift me a laurel with golden leaves; in that, I shall rightly be rewarded for all my searching. Never to find what I love, but finding my love without knowing why.

23.

Endless are the ways of misery, forever is the way of death.

Any man that claims to love life must love God, for only in Him do we have eternal life. The world, the more I see of it with my own eyes, appears to me like a broken mirror—in which I see many smaller versions of me, but do not perceive myself as a single whole. That is very much like my life; even in a river, when the light of day reflects itself perfectly, I see my own wretched reflection.

I cannot say enough how confused and overturned everything in reality seems. People go here, there, and everywhere—all of them looking up and down, left and right, inside out and outside in; but where does any of this get anyone? And where, if possible, is one to find contentment in this lack of wisdom?

The labor of man becomes the life of man, and the thought of God is driven from his heart. So long as a man labors with his hands, his mind will forever be set only upon his family and himself—and in that, he loses all connection with his true Father, the One who resides in heaven, and who made him whilst he was but a cell in his mother’s womb.

The greatest aspects of life are those that resemble sunlight: made to give color and perspective to all things, whilst the heat produced by it restores our strength, increases our love, and makes us happy to be alive. Man is always in constant struggle with what he wishes and what he must do in order to attain his wishes.

So be it, however. Let man live, and let God be praised at every moment man is alive. Though this life is but vanity in the end—ending totally in death and found in the shadow of the night—there are still good works to be done, people to love, dearest ones to be yearned for, and people to be helped.

I do not understand my love for life, but I find my love in God—and perhaps that’s all one needs to know in order to live.

24.

Forever must man search in vain for what the foundation of his life is. Eternal are the drudgeries, long labors—much to be sweated over and hated as a result. Oh, so much foolish stupidity taken as gospel today. The youth are as ignorant as ever, and the adults are as clueless in their mature age as they were when they themselves were silly youths.

So much frivolity and anger with the conditions which God and nature have given everybody. No one is happy with anything, and so they seek to forget life—as most do—in drink, or pleasure, or their affairs; or they try to become second Solomons, wanting in wisdom to discover ways by which to overcome their dissatisfaction.

Woe upon everything under the sun. All is wind, vain air, emptiness eternal, and evilness paternal. For the past faults of our fathers do we of today labor and toil. Oh, miserable children of Adam, must we always feel the whip upon our backs just as powerfully as we feel the love in our hearts for God?

I know not why I am, what I was put here for, or why I continue in the face of so many unanswered—I dare say unanswerable—questions. All I can hope for is that my faith in all that is good is maintained, and that God sustains and provides when I find myself unable to overcome life through my own understanding.

How hollow all my words and psalms of praise ring out when understood not as praises but as pleas to bypass the shock and misery which I’m constantly forced to endure as I live: Dear God, to simply live is, in and of itself, such a difficult problem for me to solve; and yet, seeing no solution in sight, I continue anyway with the hope that what I ultimately discover will help me survive. The game is not over yet, and, I suppose, so long as I have the breath of life in me, I will do what I can to find words which correspond to my heart.

25.

Even when a man feels he has said everything, he always finds more to say. Is there no end to man’s searching, and is there no end to how far he goes to find fulfillment in his searches?

I know not where to end when it comes to the contemplation of God. Just like with my lover, all I look upon that is beautiful and good reminds me of her. God is no different for me. In God do I find reason to continue living; in God, I find my highest purpose, and in that purpose do I move forward—not fearing the end, and, in fact, welcoming it with open arms. The sooner I leave this wretched Hell, which is the Earth, the sooner I may be reunited with God Himself.

Oh Lord, at this point spare me no misery. Suffering has seemingly been my only companion throughout my life. She is my mistress, and she woos me more than any mortal woman (with the exception of my immortal beloved, of course). Oh, how long must I go on in this life? When will my term end already, in order that I may no longer find it necessary to think at all?

All I do is think and worry, regretting the past and hoping in the future, only for the future to become the present and have that disappoint me greater still. I cannot stand life, and yet, I stand ten-toes down on it every day I get out of bed. I shake off my weariness, which the sleep of death put upon me, and as my brain awakes from its slumber, I am recalled to all my misery of life.

I find in that life enough, though. I find in my love of God, and my hope that things in the future will change, my reason for living. Life doesn’t matter to me that much anymore. I have no qualms about anything. I’m ready to be taken whenever the Lord sees fit. I haven’t contributed much, and for that, I think I can be thanked; for nothing I ever do comes out right anyway, and it’s not like I had the ambition to live anyway.

I have a deep sense of self-awareness when it comes to how pitiful and inconsequential I really am in this world. I feel if everyone were as honest as I, they wouldn’t be able to bear life, and would take it from themselves in order to no longer feel the whips and pangs it so often lashes us with.

All is hopeless, but… what’s this? Oh God, my God, here He is, in all His glory. I think of Him, and in Him am I recalled to nature, and find again all those things which first endeared me to life. Oh, how glorious life is when seen through the lens of God. God bless God Himself, and blessed be those who bless Him. I love you, God. Offer me the power to love you more, and I shall stick with you in faith forevermore.

26.

Man is forever at odds with himself, and the world offers him little relief. Though we think all the troubles of Earth are not for us to overcome, all we have in this life is our desires and our faults; and in fault we are large, but God is greater, and in Him do we find our path to glory.

Greatest Being of heaven and Earth, allow us, Your servants, to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which life so constantly and consistently confronts us with. Give us the endurance and the peace of mind to endure what is hard and the tranquility to reflect.

These words appear like steam upon the glass from a hot shower, and just as quickly return to the liquid from which they sprang; but whilst they hold the attention of the reader, let my intentions be known: Love God, repent for your many sins, love nature, love yourself, and return to your heavenly Father, in order that you may be restored in the full body of peace, apart from none and at one with yourself.

Oh God, dearest God, how mighty are our struggles with life. How much must we suffer in order to bypass all that vexes us? Is there not a moment in time in which man may say, “Yea, I am happy, and will remain as such for a time. When it shall end I know not, but for now I am happy.”

I cannot think of any, except perhaps a few during childhood; but, of course, it would be during a time in which our ignorance still reigned and we were content merely with the clouds and our imagination. To return to such a time as then in the now—that would be quite the thing.

Alas, though—wretched alas, which we say with much hurt to ourselves—we must be content with all that has passed for us, and which has made us in the now. The now is quite a special moment, I suppose. Give it enough thought and you’ll find much to delight in. That seems quite good. Yea—it is good; life is good, God is great, and He is King. Praise the Lord. Bless Him, and may He bless us in return.

27.

The whole world abides in darkness, and man is made to fend for himself without light. How envious we, who know, are of those who find in all this misery and misfortune a rather mundane affair.

The great mysteries of the Earth appear before us at all times, and yet very few find it worth their effort to engage with the works of God deliberately. Whosoever finds in this life something eternal has found the source of all life. God, in all His wisdom, calls on us constantly, yet we only hear His cries when our hearts are open to the mercy He wishes to provide us with.

Oh, woe is this life; woe to those who think; woe to the poet who seeks to put words to that which his reason cannot comprehend. So much evil and wickedness is about in this world—so many foolish people ignoring it or going about as if it were normal. Those who tolerate wickedness will find themselves subject to it soon enough.

Oh, repent! Repent, those who have sinned. Find in God all that truth can offer. In Him do we have not only love but salvation. Who is the man capable of moving past God by saying his own understanding is enough for him? I pity the fool who seeks only ideas to assign to different phenomena. Let not reason reign, but let our faith be secured in our own understanding. All else is folly.

28.

In so much of life do we forget to live. All our great troubles, which we think grand, are in truth the smallest trifles which mankind can conceive.

All I do is for God.

Though the darkness descends upon the sky and all that glorious light now runs away like a child in fright, I take great delight knowing that I have the heavens to myself—in order that I may gaze upon the stars and from their light seek a brighter mood for myself.

How lovely does the world appear in this silence. All the wakeful now lull themselves to sleep, and those who use their heads to get their bread find in this stillness much peace. Oh, if only all were able to express their joy silently; to use that reason they praise so much for good, for once at least.

How confusing the times are, and how much like the night—during a new moon—do our minds resemble the sky; in the great expanse of its blackness do we find ourselves. We are but children in the dark all our lives so long as we think ourselves separate from God.

I weep at the thought of not having the ability to say what my heart truly feels. Oh dearest Lord, holy High Father, most dear and near to my heart—afford Your servant the assistance of Your Ghost, in order that in being breathed into, I may speak like the wind blowing through the leaves of a tree.

Let me sing whilst I speak, and let all my sentences be like sweets to a child. Give me knowledge, oh Lord God, that I may say what is on my mind and inform those ignorant of You of Your importance. Allow me to know only what is necessary, in order that I may judge and always be correct in my deeds towards You—dear God.

29.

The powers of the mind cannot fully express themselves at all times. Oh, how wretched is our lot; what is man but a little bundle of sticks strongly wrapped together, as if in numbers we had the strength necessary to endure the weights of life?

Who has ever lived life perfectly, and who knew his moral nature well enough to keep it ever in front of his mind? Who thinks deeply about the problems of being? And who has enough wisdom to make sense of all the scattered facts of life—facts which resemble grass cut by a scythe, left there on the ground to be blown far and wide by the winds?

No, and no again! Man is like a sailor who commands a ship without a rudder. The whole of our life is constantly being pushed and nudged into this or that direction, all the while we are lost to ourselves. What good is a man that moves if the directions he moves in are not getting him closer to the destination he seeks?

So long as man lives, he must forever be in the dark with respect to his life. True self-knowledge knows its highest expression only in God. God, the Father, the Absolute—allow these contradictions to pass by us like a storm cloud; reveal to us what the requisites of wisdom are, in order that we may work towards them.

Oh, dearest Father—the Being who made me—do not let me rush headlong into that which I am unsure of in life. I know—if I know anything at all from all my seeking—that faith in You is the only bet upon which to safely place all my hope.

I believe. That is enough for life. In order to reason, I must first believe there is something to be reasonable about—and thus, in reason do I act in faith, so long as my mind is engaged with the world. That is my happiness, and my life. Praise the Lord God, Father who watches over all.

30.

To live a contented life is the hardest thing of all for man. What does man truly seek that he cannot himself see being tired of after so short a time? Woe to all those who desire at all, for life is vanity in the end, and all that we do comes to dust. Whilst I live, however, let me not think of life as it truly is—as the Lord made it—but as the Lord would want me to enjoy it.

In God do I find that rock to which to tie myself if I’m to survive the endless barrage of life. I am on all sides of the world, and in every corner of it am I assaulted with this or that event that my mind is not ready for, and that my soul did not desire. Such events make me despair of life, and make me hate the fact I was ever born; but alas, I live, and so must maintain my faith anyway.

So long as there is life there is hope, and as man moves through life his misery and suffering show themselves before him like a mirror. Ah! Are not these the sweetest evils ever cooked up in hell? They are, no doubt—but let us remain strong in God. God answers all things, for as time passes, and the more our mind is upon Him, we are provided answers which before were unknown to us.

I am heightened by all this excitement, made even more so by all the praise my deeds afford Him. Praise God. God is King, and He is here to reign over the earth for all eternity. Man has always been in need of God, and how glorious all this is—to find in our deeds the seeds which make us grow in love towards God.

Yes, even in my suffering do I see God. In so much sweltering evil do I go out into the world nonetheless, and encounter my demons and devils with pride. I am not afraid any longer, for I know I have God on my side. The world is mine, and I will make it better than when I found it. I was born in an age of bronze, and I shall leave it as one of gold!

31.

All things of the Earth shall perish and descend completely into the dirt.
There is no saving grace for man except in his Lord God. Blessed be His name.
Oh God, my God, please forgive those who do wrong in Your name;
And, in Your name, make those who love You exalted on Earth, in order that Your deeds may be followed by the few and righteous.

Where is grace but in God, and where does man find it but in his faith toward the one who gave him life?
The world, in all its darkness, finds its light through the One who made all.
There is in God a power which all may call out to and touch, should they desire to.
The Lord knows all things, and in His wisdom comes gradually all that man himself gathers whilst living in His kingdom.

Oh, blessed Lord, holy Father high up in the heavens, love those who love You, and in Your love shall we lowly sinners be restored and desire life again.
Though we know not whence our final day comes—and though, while we live now, we know not what we do or why—in You, dear God,
We find our true hope, our salvation, our true purpose in life.

Dearest, most blessed Lord, help those in need, and make those with plenty philanthropic.
Lord, give us light in order to see through the darkness of our own confusion, and in that shall we have eternal thanks and love for You.

32.

Lord God, in You we trust.
Dearest, most cherished, most praiseworthy of all things under heaven—
Dear God, save us from what we are, what we become when we stray from You, what we do that we know in our hearts we shouldn’t.
Nowhere shall I ever be equal to Your strength. Never shall I have wisdom enough to match what You already know.

Oh, dearest Lord, cast not a vicious glance at me.
Look upon me as You do all sinners: with love and mercy.
Lord, I have sinned, but no more do I wish to stray from Your true path.
I now only seek knowledge in Your nature—the external world, the trees and the bees, the love given to me by others, and the love I reflect as I contact the world.

That there is my God: You, God, the truest of all gods, nature herself.
Oh, praise the Lord, most merciful Father, highest of all that is high, above heaven itself.
Holy, holy, holy is His name, and merciful are His ways.
Greatest, most glorious God, You are the one I worship, and the one I seek most to be within, and unified with.
How weak my wisdom is when compared to those things which You know.
Alas, it is not such a bad thing.

The ignorance which I’m forced to carry with me like a shadow does not hold much bearing when I enter into Your light—oh Lord.
One encounter with You is like a rebirth.
Strong do we wax toward You, and great do we feel afterward, coming from You.
Great is the Lord; praise God, and all shall be won for us in this world.
Praise God.

33.

Oh, how pitiful man is in the face of all that this world is.
What are we but temporary fools, walking about and multiplying without purpose.
We never know what it is we are about, and all we strive after fades like a shadow as the sun descends in the East.
Man is but a miserable pile of bones, existential and contradictory, passionate and spiteful, romantic and hateful, loving and cruel;
These contradictions are what we are comprised of, oh Lord.
Though You made us all as we are, we also find it within our brain reasonable enough to forge our paths out of our own strength.

Now, does this action not resemble the builders of Babel—those who sought to reach Your kingdom, but upon whom You cast dispersions, and who were scattered like leaves in a gust?
All we are is but a weak stem held to a mighty branch, of which You are the entire tree, dear God.
Lord, save me from what I do not know; save me from what I do know and will still fail to see.
Holy God, praise be upon You. In praising You, I love You, and in Your love I feel myself whole.
Blessed is the one who remains faithful unto God, and who knows when to offer praise and thanks.

34.

Man will always be at a disadvantage when it comes to life.
Never do we find the time to praise the Lord properly,
And never do we know what we are to do tomorrow without a schedule which we had no say in making—but which the world gave us.

Oh, how cruel our life is: forever are we to labor and prosper, but little except in the Lord Himself.
Dearest Lord, most merciful and high Father, grant those in need what they need in order to live and do Your works.

Life is no equal burden, and nowhere does it reveal itself to be fair.
Only in one thing: faith! That is what we must hold to, and upon which our resolve must be set eternally, if we are to live with contentment at all in this world.
Such faith, such thought, such power. Oh, holy is the man who can move past his doubt by simply holding to that which his heart feels is right.
What an intuition one must have to see God through the perspective of common sense.
Oh, but is God common? Yes, for He is everywhere, and in Him do we find His hand at work—constantly does He shift about the fortunes of the grand and small alike.

God most high, praise all those who call out to You in moments of despair.
Reflect not anger but passion and love!
Highest being of them all, love Your creation as they love You, and in loving us raise us to a higher state than we already are in this world.

Everything is in turmoil and decay whilst we live attached to things not born of our nature—contrary to what You implanted in us, oh God.
Save us from all that is wicked, and give us the strength to labor without struggle. Love us, and we shall love You. Praise God!

35.

Hear me, my fellow human beings!
Let not my words fall on deaf ears, but let those who love God rejoice in what I say.
Blessed is he who knows the ways of the Lord, and who follows not his inclinations but the light of God.
Oh, merciful is He who knows all things, and who loves those who love Him.

I can never say all that my mind desires, and no matter how much I praise, I will always be refreshed—as if by a fresh stream—when I think upon God.
Oh, dearest God, let not these odes and psalms of joy for You be unheard throughout the world.
In writing them, allow me the freedom of mind to speak my whole mind.
Give me space to rent all that is wicked from me, and restore my soul in the words that are breathed through Your spirit.

Oh, glorious inspiration, golden prose, happy songs, and merry verses,
Let all hopeful souls come unto these words with a smile,
And may it make them say: “This here is a man who loves God.”
God, let not my efforts be in vain.
In writing these, I feel like a happy child again, seeing for the first time some lovely sight which I still recall in my mind with complete vividness.

You are the greatest of all, Lord God, and in You we only seek eternal life and guidance as we traverse this wicked life.
Dark, dark, dark is the world—cast into a bewitching night—in which only wickedness and evil seem to shoot forth from the ground;
As if Satan himself were the one doing the shooting,
Missing the mark overall, but causing enough chaos to make the calm mind quite unstable, in order to make them question their faith.
Oh, how sly and snake-like Satan is.
May he be held down with his own pitchfork by God,
And let his thrashing in the fire be delightful to us glorious ones, while his suffering increases and increases by the second.

Good is God to those who praise Him and are glorious.

36.

The soul of man is boundless, and so too are his troubles as he moves through the world.
There is no easy path in life, and the more one faces up to life, the more he feels unequal to it.
The task of the world seems to be to live for none but thyself.
Does not such an attitude display a complete detachment from God?
Where is the one to watch over me and judge me; to whom am I to give account after all my deeds; where is the one who sees what I am to become?
Do not all these questions and more have their only answer in God?
Oh, glorious God, praise our confusion, love our ignorance, and dispel all that which makes us hateful towards You.

This life is all too wicked and confusing for any man—by his reason and confidence alone—to live through it happily, I feel.
Only in faith are we saved.
In Your words—not ours—are we enlightened; and all that we do say that sounds wise was first born in You.
Nothing is without Your guiding hand, and all that I see around me is a work of Yours yearning to be recognized by Your creation.

When I step out into the sun, and see the whole of reality before me,
I begin to wonder what it was that first set all this in motion;
And the more I wonder, the more I come to understand Your handiwork in everything.

Glorious and most high God, allow me to judge that which is good and that which is evil;
In doing this, let me become like You, but not falling into despair as Solomon, or resorting to foolish lies as Adam.
Lord God, give me the wisdom and knowledge to see past all that which is wicked,
And afford me the power to never stop singing my praises of You.

This is my life whilst I read Your words.
So long as I have Your word, let me always find something to say on them.
Praise be He who is highest in heaven.

37.

How endless are the manacles which man constantly places around his own hands.
In this world we have one constant companion, and her name is suffering.
In her do we consign all our blame, and in her do we find all our pain.
It is a troubling thought to find oneself so far along in life, yet finding nothing within it.

Here, then, are my complaints and my laments, which I hope the One above all listens to with delight:

I am scared,
I am weak,
I am wicked,
I am evil.

Lord God, I am all these and a bit more:

I am timid,
I am ignorant,
I am vain,
I am ambitious,
I am frivolous,
I am gluttonous,
I am miserable
And full of suffering.

All these I am, Lord most high.

I apologize for the list, but no man today seems to be honest with himself when he confesses to He who made him.

These fragments and scraps are for You and me anyway, dear God.

Let the whole world go to hell, but so long as I have my faith in You—

Oh God—

I am restored,
I am encouraged,
I am strengthened,
I am enlightened,
I am loved, and
I am blessed.
I’m blessed, way up, I feel blessed;
In the furthest peaks of my mind am I exalted,
And in that I am one with You, my dearest God.

38.

I have forgotten the thought which inspires me.
Such is the way of life, too long to remember fully, too short to recall at all.
How the ways of the heavens move round us whilst we trace our own linear path around the ground.
This world is baffling. No amount of light from our own head can ever illuminate the whole of it.
Faith, faith, faith in glorious God. That is our answer.
Praise be He who made all, and who sees when even the little sparrows fall.

This little life is but the stuff of mystery.
In our searches, what do we find? I mean truly?
What is there on Earth which we can divine from our own minds,
Which wasn’t itself already obvious to sense, or at least not totally obscured in its complexity?

I must endure my ignorance boldly.
But I find this so hard, for I am born a scholar, and the Lord made me desirous of knowing the cause behind all effects.
It is not for man, however, to know the totality of reality.
Thus am I left cast aside, forever guessing and hating my doubt, my ignorance which springs from my desire to know, all of which causes me to doubt more and more.

It is all very unfortunate.
It is all very tiring as well.
How I maintain, only God knows.
That is why I believe, after all—
Only God has the answers I seek;
In believing in Him do I have the hope of one day knowing my purpose.
Will He be good enough to give me insights into this question one of these days?
I do not know, but He does; in that certainty do I find comfort.

Blessed is the man that knows all, and how glorious man becomes when enlightened by reality—the light of this world, which is but darkness to man unless light be shone upon it by God.

39.

In all our seeking do we seek ourselves, but in the end do we always come back to God.
Oh, this is quite fortunate—the most fortunate thing to occur in all history.
Blessed is He, the God of Earth and heaven, for all things revolve around Him,
And nothing occurs without His watchful eye of assurance.
What most are in this world are confused cretins. Undone by their own inequity, and far from God,
These people seek nothing but that which makes them ridiculous in the eyes of those who cling to God with fear and trembling.

Never can man find enough words to offer proper praise to He who made them.
I will forever be in awe of my own ignorance, of the world I inhabit, of my very existence, and my powers of comprehending it in a very shallow sort of way.
Of all the things I could use my time for, I see no better use than in this: praising God and explaining my sorrows in the interim.

All of life is a shallow sorrow, for no sadness is greater than the Lord’s when one goes against Him,
But still, as we live, we must find our lives important enough to endure and preserve.
Ah, but what work this is, and to what end do we go hither and thither—for no real purpose but that of life itself, like a beast of burden.
God, oh God, hear these laments loudly as if from a trumpet, and proclaim your sorrowful servant as worthy of slight joy.
Oh, how sweet that would be to me, dear Lord.

But your ways are mysterious, and so, I must cast aside these hopes for now, and remain a boring and soulless realist.
Idealists know the connection between subject and object,
But you, dear God, know the connection between subject and universe, object and cosmos;
We are but children in your presence—and such is why we must have faith and maintain it in you, dear Lord.

40.

In so much reflection do I find so many ideas,
And yet what comes of all my thinking but vanity and emptiness.
Never will I tire of repeating the wicked ways of the Earth.
I would love to be crowned as the poet of doom and death, of decay and deprecation.
The light of the Lord finds its way to my heart, however, and makes me cling unto Him like a baby does its mother.

Pessimism is a young man’s art, and though he may wield it with great skill, and even a bit of genius,
It will never match the laments and rage which the humble feel towards the world when God does not answer.
I find in the tragedy of misfortune a truer poetic subject than mere lamentations about the unfortunate state life is constantly in.
In so much upheaval, in so much confusion, in so much haughty lust and unrequited affection—in short, in so much general misery spread across mankind—
It is no wonder so many despise the name of God, and do all they can to willingly defame Him.
Little do they know, in defaming Him, they still recognize how great He really is.
If God were truly contemptible, He would be beneath notice, and not worth hating at all;
But alas, His influence on the hearts of men is still so firmly tied together,
That to consider the world without Him would be tantamount to saying that the world doesn’t exist at all.

All things stem from God—both good and evil—and so, what we lament is also a work of His.
There is as much evil in God as there is love, and for that reason some cannot stand to love Him—
Because they only wish to love God when He shows them love, and not when He dishes His anger out on them.
Such people are weak in faith, and should recall the whole story of Job.

Man, in order to find contentment in life, must live life as if the end of his days were nigh, and cling with all his heart and soul to the maker of all.
Love God, and the world—in all its miseries and confused sufferings—will become something; not nothing, but a strong and powerful something.

41.

Whence come we, and whence comes our day?
Oh Lord, let not the judgment of us be harsh.
The word of Yours has been spoken, resounded, and felt by all.

On this day, motivated forth by a force of love and grace,
Let me speak only what comes first to mind.
Let my mind become a temple for Thy love and grace.
Never have I known moments of peace but in Your words.

Oh Lord, great Lord, knower of all in all, all for all, what is right;
You remain the greatest there ever was.
What are the pitiless lives of men but a constant antagonization against You?

Lord, oh Lord, let Your wrath be only upon those who hate;
And let Your love be only for those who love.
All my life is but a dream in You.

Dear God, holy Father, most high in heaven, hear a sinner’s pleas.
Dearest of all things in my heart: God, faith, love, and hope!
Oh, this world knows intimately all the ways by which it can drag me into circles of hate,
And how violently it tries to lure me into its wickedness with all its pleasures—
Which, in the end, amount to nothingness, are all temporary (like our lives), and only serve to chastise Your anger, oh Lord!

Save us, give us strength, wed us to Your love, and give us faith for our sake—in order that we may do Your work with love.

42.

Words find no force but in God.
The word itself finds no power but when spoken in relation to that which is great.
All our days are spent in worry, and all our toil is but remuneration for ourselves.
Where, in all this misery, do we find our God?

Where is God?
High above, up in heaven;
Nay! Above heaven He does rest
In sweet repose as all the sons of Adam do their work with the sweat of their brow very visible, and their limbs very tired.

So much to say, so little coherence.
We write what we feel now lest we let too much of our own mind slip by us in fighting against the desire for detail and order.

Man never equals that which he feels himself capable of.
Only in our faith in the great Lord do we have an understanding of what our life could be.
Not that we know what we will become, but that we may know what will come of us afterwards.

Oh, how troubling is the thought, however, that we must always fight against ourselves, and save ourselves in order for God to truly save us.

The common view of God today may be the correct one:
He shall save us, so long as we maintain our faith and do the works of the good;
But oh, dearest woe, who can do the work of the good when all around is so bad,
And who is strong enough to maintain faith in the Lord when nothing but evil pervades this world—all endlessly and vigorously!

This life is hard—but God gives no man a challenge which he is not equal to, or the better of!
In this faith—in this faith that life will somehow work out in the end—I find my reason to live, and in that do I remain a faithful servant.

43.

If only I were an equal to my ideas.
Never in praise do I find I do justice to God, my Lord—
In the same way, I never find myself capable of writing my heart.
When I go to write, all that once appeared clear is now thrown overboard, left to drown in the sea of thought made dark with confusion.

Oh, such words are impossible to come by, I feel.
Why do we bewail life, as if God didn’t exist, as if God were dead?
Where in our hearts do we find strength to live?
In nature am I restored, and in the purpose of purposelessness do I find my salvation.
God—the most merciful and most high—exalts those who do His deeds with joy;
Let mirth only fall upon those who know how to please the Lord and uplift their fellow man.

Labor and pain are our lot on Earth. So be it, though. Create anyway.
Let not the labor of the Lord go undone. Always must we hate that which we do not wish to perform;
But the Lord knows all, and gives us our just deserts.
To all are the deserts of God given. Nowhere is man happy but in the Lord.

Forever are we fighting within ourselves.
Our souls are war zones, torn and ripped apart, mangled and bloodied by the harrowing wickedness this world provides us with.
Oh Lord, preserve us, give us strength, let our wisdom be strong in the light of Your grace.
Powerful are You, and strong do You make us when we believe in You.

44.

The constant use of imagery restores my soul.
Only in the holy words of my Lord do I find what I seek ultimately.
I find peace and clarity, wisdom and knowledge, strength and integrity.
I know what my heart yearns for, and in that I offer it up to God,
In order that His flaming arrows may strike and purify all that is within me.

My God, my God, oh, my God—
Whose flame is great, burns bright, and kills all evil within my soul.
Nowhere am I returned to my goodness but in life itself—life, that is,
That is lived in the way of the Lord’s light, and made bright with His life.

Oh me, oh my, oh I, me, mine—always do I sing the praises of God;
I constantly struggle with life, but God shall provide.
In faith do I find hope enough to live.

What is this life but death and misery in the end?
Alas, God protects all His holy children in the end.
Death does me no harm; I pass on from this realm to another,
And in that realm may my bliss be secured, and my life here not made to seem so bad in the light of that bliss.

Live on, J—, live on and fear not what this wicked world has in store for you.
There is nothing which this life can cast at you which the shield of the Lord does not guard against.
Even should a stone strike you, instantly will the Lord heal the wound, and you shall return to the battle of life restored and hopeful.
Oh yes, J—, believe in God, maintain your faith amidst so much misery, and you shall have a place in heaven on Judgment Day.

45.

Whence come I, and whence goes my life?
All my words of praise now seem like straw after what I’ve just experienced.
Oh Lord, give me the power for Your devotion.
Let me always find the time, always find the strength, always find my wits about me—
All this in order that I may praise You rightly, and justly call and remember Your works whilst I live surrounded by those who have You not in their heart, not once, not ever.

This day now seems like a trifling thing. All things on Earth are so.
So be it, though—life finds its own way, and in that are we forced to live.
We live after our own way, and in that way do we approach what is bad;
But the good Lord, knowing all, sees when we do wrong, and brings us to the good.

The bad reigns, but the good prevails.
God will provide! In Him my faith is secure. My words, paltry as they are, call upon Him,
And His ears hear all my prayers, and He answers them with all His strength.
Oh, how great the Lord is. How much work He does, all so effortless for Him.
So much that man cannot even comprehend all that is done through Him.

46.

Oh seasonal devotion, return to me once again like the beauty of spring.
Let all my words sing as they are written, and give me the power of mine to love all.

Dear God, oh Lord, King of kings and Lord of lords—
Let not this servant of Yours be left aside whilst he does all he can to praise You.

Allow my words to resound,
Heard by all in every town,
Near and far and all around
Shall what I say greatly astound!

Oh Lord, give me strength, give me wisdom, give me all that makes a man wise in the ways of Your secrets;
I want nothing to do with this Earth anymore, dear God.
I want freedom in order to pursue You.
You are my true Father, and I want Your loving care, in order that this, my present life, is not filled with vain drudgery.

Oh, how the labor of the workmen scares me so.
They work so hard, and forget so much of You, dear Lord.
Preserve them in faith, and may their perceived plight not seem so hard on them.
Give all to man that is necessary for him to make his way through life unafraid, in order that he shall endure all that comes to him.

47.

Oh vanity, oh empty words, oh wicked wisdom and shallow heads!
All this we are when we try to speak of God.
All this we are when we try to speak of life.
What is this life—in it what is so great?—that allows us to live happily and without regret?
Can a man even answer such questions? Man knows not where his thoughts arise, and yet is forced to ask such questions.

Woe to man, woe to those who think—most especially those who think.
Unhappy is the man who reflects and gathers wisdom, but sees the foolhardiness of it all.
It is a brave thing to desire to know, but man is not strong enough to withstand his ignorance!
Hence why falsehood abounds so greatly, and why it is treated with great respect today.
When answers are wanting, and God is far from man’s heart, man will want for everything but goodness and godliness.

The pleasures of this world destroy all hope of union in you, God.
Preserve me from such devilishness, and give me the power to not stutter when in the presence of those who hate you.
Through your breath of life was I born, and in you I have my salvation. Amen to that!

But Lord, my tears are not yet dried, and my heart is always weary of some trouble that is to come my way in the future.
Such is why I write: in order that my teeming mind will find some relief in all the confusion the world tosses at me.
Give me strength to recover, and wisdom to judge, and love to do good.
That is all I ask for, oh Lord.

48.

We never know where to begin in praise, but we usually know when to end.
It is an astonishing fact that man can think and write as he does at all.
It would seem to me that man does all he can in order to forget the misery of life.

Oh, how often do I have thoughts which seem good, but lose their luster the moment I go to set them down on paper.
Alas, oh Lord, all the struggles I deal with in composition are faced by me also in my attempts to praise You.

I cannot wonder any longer, however. I must write. I must do. I must act.
My heart cannot remain cold for long.
I have to release all these thoughts—coherent or not—out into the ether,
In order that they may be picked up by some wandering soul.

Those are who I seek to speak to: the wayward and downtrodden, the confused but hopeful souls, those who seek God but who lose Him in the process.
Lord, give me the light, shine brightly on me, and allow my soul to rise to heaven—
All in order that I may find my hope in this life,
And in that hope resolve to live for more, become more, love more.
I only seek to live well, and in living well learn to love well; in loving, may others learn to do the same as well.

49.

Many walk paths their own, and how they suffer on account of it.
Oh weak individualism, false hope, little consolation, impossible management of affairs in a confused head storming in darkness only.
Man broods over his suffering, his misery, his death, his end.
Oh, this life seems endless whilst we live it.
How hard life seems when going through it.
Our stories all seem to run the same, and yet in their running do we tire ourselves and wish them to end prematurely.

Ah, how difficult this life is.
Oh Lord, hear the cries of a sinner. Make me happy again.
In my faith in You, show me my wrongs; give me the power to act in this world, and to never turn away from You.
Let me live for You whilst among those who despise and hate You.
Should I enter the world—and not see You prematurely on account of my own hands—
Allow me to see all without being corrupted by anything.

Oh Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord—oh Lord God—help me in these times of need.
May all I say have, if not wisdom, conviction—in order that I may do what is right for me and mankind as a whole.

Is it possible for me to live as I do now forever?
Will I ever see my dearest love—the love of my life?
Oh God, dearest God, allow me to live with my dearest R—.
At present, I ask for that and nothing more!

50.

What are all my praises but the heights of despair dispersed through lamentations for that which is above me?
Oh dearest Lord, know my troubles and preserve me from them.
Give me the strength to endure them, and in them may I find wisdom for life.
I seek nothing more in this world but the knowledge of my own self.
Is there anything—any experience at all—which will comfort me in some way,
Or which will show me the right path, lighted by Your light, oh Lord?

I know not anything at all, I think to myself at times:
The world is plunged into darkness,
There is fear in my heart,
And every step I make trembles the Earth,
And makes it seem as if nature herself is angry with my motion.

Oh, how endless are these complaints of mine.
Shall I not, like Christ at the end of Revelation, find myself with enough deeds to fill all the paper of Earth?
This is all endless.
The world is endless.
Man is endless.
All possible permutations of existence
Give this life a shockingly minuscule role overall.
I know not whether to rejoice or scream in despair at this fact.
The best I can do, I’ve found, is only reveal myself to the world as honestly as I can.

In the dark hours of the night,
Alone and solitary do I sit and think,
Pondering life and all its miseries,
And turn I do to the words of God
In order to find some relief in what is written.

Ah, but words and words and words;
Where have any of these things gotten me:
Nowhere!
My meditations mean many things,
But I doubt their multitude magnifies their magnificence.
Alas, how sad all this is.
Dear God, allow me to overcome all this hopelessness I feel presently.

51.

Never will man find what he searches for in this life.
What is this life but a temporary stay upon a rock revolving around a sun.
This is all vanity.
We live in order to die,
And have all our hopes and dreams dashed to pieces in the end by death.
I cannot say it is a bad thing per se, only a very sad fate we all must live.

To think, there are those who claim to live without you, God;
Those who say, “We know God not, and care not for Him!”
They say such wickedness with pride too.
As if being separate from you were a good thing.
Oh how confused the times are.
How every age has had its trouble, its misery, its misfortune.
My greatest misfortune is that I was born at all.
All my laments stem from the fact that I experience life at all.

Oh, to God—I say to you dear God—were it to me, or rather to You,
You should have spared this contemptible sinner, this worthless little man that I am.
Not in the slightest do I wish to experience all this doubt and confusion I have now.
It is a great suffering that makes man dear to the end of his life.
I know this. I feel this. I want that. I want that for myself.
An end, to put a stop to all this sensation.

Oh Lord, how I suffer away from you, and how I hate being away from you.
All this is miserable, and I fear I have not enough mouths to speak and scream in all the directions.
I wish my words were capable of filling the whole world;
Then would people have an understanding of my misery,
And would perhaps then empathize with me,
Rather than calling me
Quixotic,
A dreamer,
Romantic, and
A Doomer.

52.

Shall my heart ever find enough words to put to my sorrow?
Woe is upon me, and all this flame and fire which destroys me
No longer affects me, for I find my salvation in God, in God, in God!

That there is the rock upon which I place my feet, and in Him do I
Find reason enough to continue on. What misery in this life compares
To the love which he shows those who cling to him passionately?

I may be wise at times, I may be foolish at times, but at all times am I in the wrong with respect to myself and to God.
I always wrong myself when I seek to do good, and I always reveal my hate when all I should show is love towards those who anger me, but whom I should love—not for their sake but for God’s sake.

Oh my, oh my, wretched life—hateful, cruel, barbaric, angry, wicked, evil, in short.
All these adjectives reveal to me what the world truly is.
In the words of God do I find my salvation, however.
All my existential woes, my worldly doubts, my miseries and past sufferings—
What are these in the presence of God, my maker, my father, my rock, my salvation, my joy and life!

Like a fresh breeze does the spirit of God move through me—
Like a symphony played through the leaves on a sturdy tree whose trunk lives a thousand years,
And whose life springs forth new offspring in this world.
Heavenly joy, lovely life, endless, infinite, supreme, high, mighty;
All this, ah, all this—how wonderful life suddenly seems.

53.

The beauty of nature calls to me, and I am restored by her sounds and sights.
Blessed life, happy wind, moving clouds, and shining sun;
Are all these things not the highest pleasures which one can think of?

I sit and ponder upon the Lord in silence,
And in my reflections do I find happy thoughts arise in my mind.
I am seized with hope, captured by joy, and merry with mirth.
Oh, like a fortuitous wind do I leap across the Earth,
And find myself in the presence of happy spirits;
My mind is one long memory,
A machine designed to make moments into memories.
How dear are these dearest things to me.
To sing in song and tear in misery.

Ah yes, that is my life, a happy moment, a miserable one.
Lord, my God, save me from the bad, endear me to the good;
Let my mind be populated by the happy thoughts of my past,
In order that I may make similar memories in the present,
And remember my cries as I shout them now, so I may not in the future.
Oh Lord, my God, my God, beautiful and glorious you are—
Make me a true servant, make me like an angel, let me be beautified by you, in order that I may do your deeds upon Earth!

May I never tire of life: may I always find love in it, draw strength from it, and overflow with joy because of it, in spite of all my misery.
That, dear God, is all I ask from you: the capacity to live without fear of losing myself, of losing you, of always having Your light upon me, in order that I may see what I’m doing, and do only what is good as a result of such a powerful light.

54.

What beauty do the clouds possess.
What greatness is found in simplicity.
How tolerable and easy does life seem when it’s lived without care or concern for those things which are far from God.
What trouble comes upon those who seek to live without God, without faith.
What difficulty is experienced by those who think their reason is above God’s reason.
How could such a thing be, when God was the one who gave man reason!

Oh, all this troubles only him who thinks He is not the maker of all, and who considers Him just a thing, an idea, an abstract nothing.
No! To this I reply, “No!” Firmly and stoutly. I make no pretensions, assume no prejudices—I only seek to glorify God so long as goodness reigns in my heart, and faith is maintained in my brain.
I do not know, but God does. Let that alone be a happy fact to always turn to when my own reason fails to comprehend the world.

Indeed, the world is better when it’s not lived in trying to comprehend it, but in trying to wrestle with things which the mind can never encompass.
Turn your wicked ways away for once, and enter into the kingdom of God with great glory as you shun evil.
Yes, remove yourself from the wicked and you shall appear anointed and lovely in the eyes of God.
Short is life, long is death,
But in dear God we have the best.

55.

Nobody can predict what God is thinking.
Only God knows what we are thinking.
In Him are we saved, and through him do we find life.

Oh Lord God, highest in heaven, look upon those who do your deeds
And bless them mightily, in order that they may stay on the golden path;
The path paved in the deeds of the good and beautiful—those nearest to you—
Which is sturdy and firm in its foundation, and which shakes not, not even when your anger is roused.

Dear God, you know what I am thinking, but how may I know what I may think in the future?
How may I be spared from deeds not becoming of me—evil, in fact?
Oh Lord, I know not, but you do. Such is the case, and forever will it be.

Save me then, oh Lord, and preserve me from all the wickedness I encounter as I move through the world.
The world is wickedness and vanity wrapped like a baby in its blanket.
Let not these evil things approach me.
Preserve me, give me strength, keep me nigh from death, and behold my soul whilst it rests;
Peer into my heart, see what wickedness lies dormant,
And through your golden light evaporate all wicked spirits that are not born in love for you.
Sustain and hold me, oh Lord, in order that I may do the deeds of the angels, and You.
Keep the dreads of life at bay, and only allow the holy to enter my life.

56.

May I find the strength to follow my own path rightly,
To follow my own truth truthfully,
And to hear the deeds of the good with pride and joy.

Oh words, how little you seem in the present;
How little do I feel an equal to the feeling which inspires you.
God, blessed father, give me wisdom enough to satisfy myself and the world as a whole.

I saw coming down from the mountains a bright light which spelt the coming doom for all that is wicked,
And which warned the doers of good they should not move from their path of goodness in the slightest.

All this I have seen; all this I have heard; and all this I have felt.
The correspondences of nature call unto me, lure me, cull my wicked deeds, and make me exalted among the men who are holy.

Oh dearest Father who art in heaven, dwell you do upon high;
In your highest space above the heavens may I find a place not far from the right hand of your power.

In the spirit do I move with much vivacity and life;
As if life were a thing of fun, a joy overflowing with mirth and laughter.
None but the devil shall disturb me in such contemplations.

Oh Lord, highest father, see all that I think—knower of all I do—
And in these thoughts do I not make myself true to you,
And do I not seek to be more good for You, in order that I may receive all the blessings necessary for life from You.

Holy Father, my Father, most dear to my heart—I call to thee with glee, and seek only for my wisdom to be increased the more I force myself upon Your spirit;
In the contemplation of You do I seek to understand my heart, in order that, in making my heart clear, I may act more in line with my heart, and perform more goodness for Your sake—oh Lord!

Dear Father, most noble and powerful of all, I only seek the happiness of mankind;
Afford me the power to make these dreams of mine become reality.
Show me the way, take the wheel and steer my path through me as I abide in Your spirit;
Take everything from me, so that You may remake me more perfectly in your image.
Make me a greater soul, so that your creation may find You, and praise you more powerfully through their godly deeds.

Divine One, Thee, Father in heaven—make all this be, and whilst it becomes a thing, You shall reap all the joy your creations have built for you.
Spirit, noble, most high spirit, allow for man to know himself, in order that he may not fear the coming of day; let him not love the approach of night, in which the bed is viewed as a coffin, and a wistful sleep is dreamed upon as a sort of death.
Let us not seek the ashes too quickly. Only in life shall we find you there.
Let us act, and we shall find you!

57.

The dearest sight is that of heaven.
I seek the glory of life in the beauty of its sights;
In the world do I see what is good and what is evil.
In this, where shall I go for comfort except in those things which are good?

Dearest God, maker of all, is not this great creation the work of Your hands?
What magnificence does all this contain!
Though the life of man is all too short to obtain
All that which he wishes in the end, there is life enough
In the simplicity of things small and grand alike.
Man only comes about the grand but few times in his life;
The simple is where man must repose himself. The rock that bears
All sighs and groans is powerful—it has seen things which God alone can attest to.

Mighty existence, powerful in pain and strong in misery,
We demand a fair treatment for all our deeds which glorify our Father who art in heaven.
What measures and lengths we go—to carry ourselves with a yardstick—
To measure out the whole Earth and still find ourselves so empty;
What vanity is man’s life in the end.
What greatness do we see, all to pass like a flash of lightning. To what end
Do we do anything at all—where is wisdom enough for life?

I find not in idols nor in priests what I seek: God! That is my rock, my love, my nature, my mirror which takes all things in and reflects them back out to me in glorious visions.
Light is but a spectrum of color, but in that we behold the whole purpose of life;
God made that, and we are His children. Let us cling to Him,
And love him for our sakes.
Amen.

58.

I think upon my life and find no hope.
But in the thought of God I find all hope.

Whence comes my day, of great repetition,
In all revolving scenes I find this mirth
To be a petty thing that only men
Aspire after, and thus lose themselves
In great disaster. So much for those men
Who stray from the Lord. This life is grand and
Deserves the full attention and the care
Worthy only of those things which command
The respect of those enlightened in the heart
And made more dear to God on account
Of what it is that man does seek in this life.

Various are the demands and many are
The great commands which lead a man only
So far as his own strength allows him more.

59.

Do not force that which you cannot command.
The world is large but small are your powers
To make demands upon yourself that lie
Far beyond what you can presently do.

Life—a thing which man must live in full
If he is to find that great reason for his
Coming into being. It cannot be
said enough: this life is vain and all our works
Come to naught in the expanse of time.

Let us, then, find the foundation upon
Which we may build a better world for ourselves.
Oh God! In nature do I find that world
Which clears my soul and endears me to life.
What perfection this world contains when viewed
Without a tainted eye which paints all things
With great insignificance—dreariness!

60.

In the full praise of life do I divert
The whole attention of my being
In order to proclaim that love which I
Feel so strongly within my heart. This world
Is a great thing of beauty which no man
Can ever find an end to, or ever
Exhaust to the extent that he will be
Satisfied. Hence, God, who knows all things,
Lures us wanderers in with His nature;
That great, glorious delight which we can
Never get enough of, nor find an end
To its power and beauty: a thing sublime.

61.

The Lord knows all and he commands my life.
I need not say more, if I can help it.
Though He wills me, and I, along with Him,
Go for the ride which lifts my spirits high,
In all this do I find the greatest joy
In all my life. Praise God, the Lord, so high
Does He reside among the stars of heaven;
How small must we appear to His great vision?
Oh Lord, King of kings, let not your mighty force
Be used against us who have strayed from Your
Noble path—Your graceful way which we cannot
Follow in full, but which we aspire to.

62.

The world is a great tomb which waits for man
To cast aside his ghost and lose the host
Which once did dwell in that body which carried
All the deeds and all the sins committed
By that man. Oh, great the ground we walk upon,
Filled with all the bones of us great sinners;
Filled too with ashes, mixed with dirt and tears.

Oh world, how large you are—great creation
From the heavenly host, King of kings,
God! Yes! Savior of all humanity,
On whose salvation we depend, and whose
Benevolence we can’t dispense, but which
We can call upon whilst we pray with faith.

63.

I found the spot upon which I looked out
And saw the tree of life just sitting there,
Staring at me very beautifully.

I was overcome with great emotion,
And found my soul overturn in great
Commotion! I thought and said many things,
All to myself in such a moment then,
And in the end considered this was life.

Oh life, oh life, how sweet, like a tree—
Was all this beauty of yours meant for me?
For me, for me, all lonely to myself;
A hermit I am, a solitary man.

How I do love my silence, dear—
The sun and books, how near
They are to me when I, in moments alone,
Sing the song of joy unto the air,
And hope the Lord is there to hear my praise
Of Him. For Him do I make all laments,
And try my best to recompense for all
Which He has done for me in this my life.

Quite a strange thing that lonely life is—
Tossed I was into the world,
And broken from a different mold,
But in all this I did not find
Reason enough to make me cry, or to
Opine on this or that aspect of this:
My life—a wanderer’s story indeed!

64.

Life finds all its joys too short a time.
The more we wish to find ourselves in great
Delight, the more it takes its toll on us,
And longer do we mourn over our mirth.

Temporary are all the pleasures of Earth.
Only in fear of the great Lord do we
Have eternal joy; a life of bliss cut short
By all things of this Earth of no import.

How short our days, and narrow be the times,
But it is still enough for me to walk
About the great oak trees, and find in them
Nature enough—all that is necessary
For my life, and which I cannot live without.

65.

I give my praise to You atop the
Highest hill; and in that space am I
Frozen for a moment, dazed and confused.

The beauty of this world cannot have bounds,
And all the more we sing its praise do we
Find all that we set out to find within
Ourselves! The world, indeed, returns us to
Ourselves—happy do we become at this.

Great world, great life, great Lord who rules over all;
In You do we discover hope and faith,
And also do we find our love sustained.

Over the mountains and through the fields
Does God’s spirit blow across the whole of
Earth, and in our breathing do we find our soul.

66.

Within myself I find desires strange.
My soul, tossed and turned about in the tumults
Of the world, is made strong by firm reflection
In that which I hold my faith firmly to:
God! God! God! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Let that be His great name and praise in the
Record book of the world, which holds the accounts
Of which He is master and watcher of.

Holy Father, dearest God, Your servant
Calls out to You with teary eyes and seeks
Your forgiveness. Will You offer it to me?
Yes? Oh, blissful joy do I find myself in.

Holy Father, my God, my life is restored
By Your words, and at once do I gain strength
And confidence—that necessary for life.
No more are my desires in line with sin.
All they can be now is revealed in the light
Of His holiness, who makes all things clear.

67.

In joy shall my world be encompassed.
In the power of God shall my faith persevere.

In Him who sees all things, there I shall be;
In Him who knows all things, there I shall be;
In Him who loves all things, there I shall be.

Blessed be the man who knows God, and who knows true love in Him.

Dearest God, holy Father of our world: save the blessed (those who pray unto You), preserve the meek (those who know not Your word or faith), and curse the wicked (those who do evil in Your name).

There is but one God; blessed is His name.
Holy Father, King of kings, strengthen us on this day, in the next, and till the end of our days.

I awake into this world, born in light, shining bright, but followed by all inequity.
Father, protect me from all inequity. Let not such darkness overcome my light—Your light, in truth, which burns all evil once illumined by You and Your power.

Holy is the Blessed One. Praise the Lord.

68.

Let all things come and go as they are to pass.

This world is but a bundle of sticks and stones,
Used at the discretion of intelligent apes,
To conquer this or that continent—
As if any of that really mattered at all.
What are these things, O Lord, to Your holiness?

Is man not the greatest and worst of all creation?
Is not man—in all his judgment, and in all his ability to decide to do good over evil, or evil over good—
The most wretched and blessed of creatures simultaneously?

I find in our faith in You, O Lord, the strongest foundation for life.
You are my preserver, my rock, my hope, and my life.

My Lord and my God—may these joyous ejaculations rise to heaven;
May their sound resound as wind passes over the Earth,
And may they be heard by those who love You and praise You, for they are the words familiar to their hearts.
Allow us who love You a place in heaven, a happy life on Earth, and an eternal repose in Your love, O Lord.

Let not what we do out of our hearts be judged harshly by You,
But only those things which we take into our hearts we know to be against You!

69.

Let the mind come and the mind work.
Force not the thought, but maintain the sense.
Integrity is blessed, but faith is more so.

Love all things as they arrive, and accept the fate of death.
No mortal man outlasts his stay.
All men are born unto death, and so shall go like the wind.
This life is but an image, with death’s deathly reflection cast back at us as we stare into it.
So be it. Love strengthens all, preserves all, sustains and upholds the very foundations.
Let love reign supreme—it conquers all!—and all shall come unto man easily.

O words, O sense—what are all thy meanings to me when I know not the source of your power and force?
My heart brings you all forth,
But it knows not whence you came, where you go, and what you shall be in the end.
O endless delirium. Senseless thoughts and figures that dance in the mind but find no understanding.
Lord, help me. God, save us all.

70.

The Word of the Lord is strong.
The Logos, the reason, the sense, the understanding, the faculties of mind—
God hath done a great work with thee, O mankind.
Call upon your Father, and He shall answer unto you with loving care.

Dear Lord God, let not all our praises fall upon the wind alone;
Let not the feeling of our woes go unheard;
Let not our loves be without reciprocation.

O me, O life, the whole of this experience confuses me.
Where do I go from here but to the grave?
Such nightward thoughts do perplex the mind,
But I have faith, I have love, I have strength.
Dear God, preserve these things, increase them, and sustain them through Your power.

I can work only as far as my heart and strength allow.
I can’t work on things when I am far from You, O Lord.
I can only take my intellect so far before it finds its limits and cries in despair.
I can’t further what I have taken to the limits, but You, O Lord, can remove all fear from my heart;

At once do limits seem a vain thing, and with hopes restored do I set to work:
To increase knowledge further,
To strengthen faith further,
To love those I love further, and
To hope for those in need further.

71.

A man may do good works but not find them immortal.
Alas, the fate of all great things is to fade and to decay.
Only in the Lord do we find anything eternal,
And in Him are we not only saved and preserved but loved and strengthened.

Dearest Father up in heaven, hear these words, increase in joy at them, and shine Your heavenly light upon me and those who hear my soul in these words.

Allow me, whilst I live amidst thick and thin, sin and suffering, love and hate, to find encouragement in Your words—O Lord!

God, O God, holy Father—dearest King of kings—preserve me, give me strength, hear my words, and bring them to truth.

Guide me always with Your light, shun me from my wicked ways, show me that which is dark, and lead me to enlightenment.

72.

Can a man ever say everything he wants?
“I fear the Lord.” Let that be the only thing a man needs say—
For in that one phrase is contained the whole of wisdom.

Maintain the good, shun the evil, instruct the young, and maintain your faith in God.
Let these four things be the only things a man needs to endure life.
Life is such an endless battle,
Constantly going up and down upon a steep hill, does it feel like,
And yet, there is a great joy in it that cannot be fully explained without losing the beauty of its simplicity.
All that we strive for may be nothing in the end, and so it is with even the greatest man’s ambitions—
But allow us to live with the infinitude of that fact.

O Lord, let not the contradictions and conceptual infinities lead us astray.
Always preserve us in strength, faith, and wisdom.
May Your light always be upon us who love You, and may our misfortunes be dashed against the rocks of their own inequity.

The life of man is the life of all organic things—
To pass away into oblivion, a great dissolution which cannot be overcome.
All things come from without absolutely—at least to man’s knowledge—
But let that invisible string which pulls a man’s passion (from without) hither and thither
Be the thing that leads him to His grace.

Lord God our Father, let us always be in Your presence, never out of Your heart, and perpetually in Your light.
Your light is our wisdom, and in that do we overcome all inequity in this life.

73.

Once again do I make attempts to speak my heart.
O Lord my God, never does it get easier for me to praise what You are.
When I reflect on all the good You have provided me,
And all the obstacles which You placed in my way in order to strengthen me and endear me to You,
I stand still and silent in the light of Your glory, and whilst I bathe in the beauty of so much wisdom—
Confident for once that my mind is capable of saying what it truly knows to be true—
I thank You silently, O Lord, and make You a part of my mind forever.

Never do I wish to be without Your word, O God.
God, greatest Father up in heaven, give me strength of mind to learn all Your ways;
Give me the courage to face my life and adversaries;
And above all, give Your love, dear Lord, so that I may always have a sense of the holy and powerful about me.

74.

Disquietude and vanity are all I see.
Upon this Earth no mortal thing shall last forever.
Only God can live forever, and in Him do we find our forever.
Yea, even Earth itself shall one day burn like a cinder born from a great flame.
This whole phenomenon is but a chance occasion.
Let it all flow on along the stream of time long enough, and see how it decays to nothingness.
Ah, that is our life, a brief fire full of smoke and fury, which time itself shall quench.

I get no satisfaction out of pointing out the obvious anymore.

The ways of man seem set, and—I think to myself at times—the more man tries to change, the more he reverts back to what he has always been.
Change is the mother of time, and innovation the ingenuity of man—born in the mind of those who think change is a thing to adapt to.

I, for one, find all things vain—and hope is but the dross of pessimism and realism, reality collapsing in on itself.
The more a man sees the world, the more he obtains his own wisdom, and in doing so always acquires an understanding of what true sorrow is.

75.

I think it’s time I finally love the world.
I think it’s time I finally return to God.
I think it’s time I finally start to live.

O, for so long have I been unable to say such words truthfully.
For so long did I take the world to be a stage upon which is playing out a rather subpar drama.
That drama was my life, and it was confused in all sorts of ways:
Not only were the acts incoherent and confused, but the dialogue was utterly dreadful.

I must speak my mind now, however, lest my verse shall halt for it.
No longer do I wish to halt, to hesitate, to reflect only;
No longer do I wish to consider my inaction as a kind of activity.
I now only wish to affirm, to act, to perform great deeds that uplift the soul of mankind as a whole.

Is such a conception not the most grand one conceivable?
Never before have I felt myself more capable of this than now.
Praise God, for He is King, and He has given me this strength of mind necessary for me to carry out my plans.

This world shall know love!
He that knows love increases joy, and in much joy is much forgetfulness of suffering.
Freedom from suffering is all mankind has ever wanted.

This consciousness of ours is a powerful and sacred thing, and should be commanded with great care and diligence;
It is our duty, I feel, to wield our lives in such a way as to make them a work of art.
Could man live like a great painting: forever caught in a still frame of eternal greatness?
I don’t know, but I think to attempt such a thing is the most admirable cause a person can give their life to and die for.

76.

Amen! Amen!
That is the word that hath spoken itself into those mysteries of the world.
Amen! Amen!
Let us only speak of things with which we are in agreement and in which we find joy.

I hate to see dissimulation set upon man like a foul air.
Man is a plague to man when he does not make it his task to love others as himself.
There is no humanity without integrity to love.
Steadfast in the ways of the Lord must we be if we are to preserve our love and increase it.
No longer should man set upon others with harassment and disagreements:
Refutations of ignorance never got a friendship anywhere;
And what is mankind but one friendship constantly being weakened and strengthened by our fidelity to love?

Humanity waxes in the ways of truth and falsehood, and constantly drives forth into life, which leads to a cliff-edge of death.
All these images swirl around as I contemplate what this existence is,
And further do I see the beauty and vanity of it all simultaneously.
Oh life, glorious life, be lifted up to the Lord, in order that He may breathe over it and sustain it everlastingly.
Praise the Lord!
Amen! Amen!

77.

What glory the world seems when one has God within.
Dearest Father who lies above us,
Dearest Father who preserves and loves us,
Dearest Father who sustains and maintains us,
Dearest Father who disdains the bad and encourages the good in us,
May we find in ourselves the power of hope necessary to find faith in you.

Oh, my God, how hard life is without belief in you;
How difficult it is to live in a world surrounded on all sides by vipers and scheming apes.

People live today as if You died long ago, as if You were dead and buried, as if Your firm believers were nonexistent.
Even believers waver at times today, for things are so difficult with us that we find our prayers to You mostly unanswered.

Dearest God, give us the fortitude to endure these evils, these overpowering influences;
Let us shun the works of the devil, do Your deeds on Earth, and strive to find ourselves in Your love at all times.

Oh God, my God, do not leave me to the darkness;
In your eternal light do I wish to be, in order that I may be freed from all these iniquities which I am forced to dwell among and endure whilst I live on Earth.

Dearest God, most holy Father, give me the strength to endure, the wisdom to judge, the power to overcome, and the foresight to know where to steer myself.
All this, and nothing more, is what I desire, oh God!
Praise You: Holy! Holy! Holy!

78.

I wish no longer to believe in sin.
I want no part of that which ends in death.
Yet do all things upon this Earth decay,
And rouse themselves up from their sleepy bed
To harm their mind with thoughts of being dead.

Such woe, such woe, impossible it seems
To be an equal to this task: our life!
Oh woe, such woe, to all our friends and foes
Does it affect alike, and yet in spite
Of all that which comes into the frame of life,
Man finds there’s hope enough through love and faith.

Blessed God, Blessed man, may we find ourselves
In the afterlife all holding hands.

79.

At times I praise in prose, at others I praise in verse;
Some days I give all my praise, and others none at all.
Lord, forgive me where I fail and bless me where I succeed.
I can only ever speak what my heart commands.

Whilst the mind goes about in lies, I speak the truth forcefully in the presence of the Almighty for my sake.
I only want to write as I think truthfully.
The truth only matters to me so long as it praises You, oh God, and encourages me to speak it more and more.
I want wisdom above all else, in order that I may serve as a light to man as You are a light to all mankind.

Blessed is He, for He is our Father, and in Him do we find all that sustains us in faith and love.
We hope, dear God, that we may one day know our hearts as You know our hearts.
We hope, dear God, that we may love others as You love us.
We hope, lastly, dear God, that in all our good deeds we are looked upon in favor—
Make us worthy, oh Lord, my God, in order that we may find ourselves cast up from hell, ascending to heaven, only to fall into Your loving arms.

We must ascend from darkness, secure the keys, brace the gates, skewer the winged beast, and, alas, achieve freedom!
In You, dear God, do we find eternal rest, and in freedom find ourselves loving all things as they have come to be made by You.

80.

My mind is the pen of a ready writer,
But I struggle all the same, oh Lord,
When I try to actually praise You rightly.

Dearest Father who art in heaven, please provide Your faithful servant a means to endure his stutter, his hesitation, his uncertainty, his distrust of life.
God Almighty, glorious be He and His name, give Your faithful servant gladness in his weakness, humility in his strength, and thankfulness in all his mundanity.

I do not require much in order to live well: faith, hope, love, and security in my means.
I want satisfaction, contentment, peace, serenity, simplicity, and love.
I wish to make myself a vessel of the Holy One. May His Spirit breathe into me, in order that through His Spirit may I be animated, move about, and find hope through action.

Oh, but action frightens me so, dear God. To act in a world as fallen as this one is to open yourself up to a sea of troubles which no man can endure without great loss, injury, or harm.
Oh, woe is life! What is life? What is being? What is all this we name and say, as if we knew anything at all.

Compared to You, oh Lord, we are like ants, merely coming together to sustain ourselves in the end—but we find ourselves in a death circle which we have walked for ourselves.
The longer we live, the more we see how life plays us like a fiddle, and leaves us out to dry whilst the sky is overcast, and a cold wind blows.
This is all intolerable to my soul, oh Lord, and I ask for Your protection in every moment like this one.

I love You, dearest God, Holy Father:
The Lord is with me!
The Lord is in me!
And in that love, I find life.

81.

From heaven descends the holy light of bliss.
In these rays do we find our hope and joy;
In spite of all the passings of life to and from despair,
We find in these little things enough of life.

Yes! Life seems all but complete when in the midst of these
Dazzling lights, breaking through the clouds crepuscularly.

Highest heaven shining so bright,
To cause man so much fright
He thinks his life fulfilled in seeing
All that which nature brings,
Singing all along the Earth, hearing
The most wonderful sounds imaginable—
Only matched by what the eyes perceive:
Glorious sense, joyous span of time, spent
In wonder, wandering through all of heaven’s rings.

82.

The mind: a blank slate that defines itself.
When one thinks, one fails to find the why
Behind the thought—what caused it in itself.
But no man is perhaps an equal to the task
He sets himself should he strive to find the “why.”
What “why” is great enough for man to ponder
In the mind? Why not a “why” in the body?
There live in us many strange sensations.
Are they not to be put on par with intellect?

Oh, delirious verse, worthless smoke is all.
When words fail to come, we must necessarily run
Headlong into a dark abyss by which
We do not know what lies within; perhaps
Something lies hidden there, perhaps bad,
Perhaps not, but we should not find out.
Let us remain safe where we are,
And find our own delight within the stars.

83.

What a marvel this singular world is.
Could any man find within himself the strength
To describe it all so wonderfully, so naturally, so true?

All its grandeur and beauty, so often passed by without notice by most,
Now rightly set before our faces in the right frame of mind.
In such a time do we discover the true meaning of sense.

Oh life, joyous world, how could my heart ever shape the words
Which are supposed to reflect all that which I see before me,
And which gives me unmatched glee?

No poet seems able to convey what it is they themselves feel.
Alas, let the nature of man correspond to his own nature alone;
In that shall he find the confidence to freely speak his heart,
And in doing so give the world every praise it so rightly deserves.

84.

True life is but the glory in the ever-after,
And the world we see before us is good only for scorn and laughter.
Man lives on borrowed time, and his stay is all too short to be of any note.
Though the life of man is short and his art long, the skies alone speak glory unto heaven.

Oh, highest things of Earth, may you forever be dear to us.
May we always find you in our thoughts, and may we never tire of seeing your glorious visage.
You are colored in mystery and veiled in darkness,
But I still call out to you, wondering what you are.

Dearest nature, highest mother, to you I give praise and thanks.
In you did I find myself again, new and improved,
Altered by the sights which you were gracious enough to afford me.

So many things does this world offer us as consolation for the sufferings predominating life
That it would strike anyone with a heart of astonishment how much we can endure so long as we find joy in merely existing among nature.

Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!
That is the life for me worth striving after.

85.

I sing the song of my heart today;
Tomorrow I sing the same but in a different way.

I know not what all the fuss is about with regard to the world:
A perfect pearl is all it is—a sphere of extreme magnitude,
A beauty supreme,
A masterful act of creation by the one above all.

Nothing strikes my mind more than its own thoughts.
My reflections come to me like a flash, and in them do I obtain what I sought.
Peace, love, joy, the works—all these are my companions in life,
And through them do I maintain, even in strife.

Glorious day,
Shining bright,
Upon the sights,
And heavenly hay.

If only I could stay
A bit longer in this world,
In order to lay
The foundation stone
For all to herald.

86.

Man writes as he wills, but not as he pleases.
The glories of a verse are found in these:
Imagery, rhythm, consistency, and love;
Of all these, love takes the helm,
For it is of a heavenly realm,
And those without it do not sustain their lines
With any honesty or sense sublime.

To write extemporaneously—
Ah! What boldness, how crass,
But who can deny the joy it has?
So often do our rules divide us,
Never helping to unite us;
Desolate are we made by constant disagreements,
Always striving to gain the upper hand in bereavements.

But man is no such creature as to rise above the stars;
Rather must he always walk about in uncertainty,
Seeing all things from afar,
And steeping himself in perpetual doubt—unfortunately.

87.

What is this life but mine to spend and waste?
Who’s it that commands this body and this soul?
Why does this world at present move in haste,
Getting places but with an obvious hole
Within their hearts? So much sacrificed for so little.

Who gets anywhere in life anyway?
It’s only a continuous circle revolving round;
Time plays its tune through our souls and lets us down,
Slowly, gently—for some—and others with a violent sound:

The fools never saw it coming, confused as they are all around—
Populated with so many false ideas and tragic notions,
None of which lead them to any solutions.

I ask again, then: “What is this life?”
Mine to spend and waste, and nothing else—
Save perhaps strife whilst I live,
And death in the end.

88.

Not on this day tormented forth;
Our lives go round in merry mirth,
Upholding the stars and the universe
Within a single act of life in hope.

Though our days are limited,
And our purpose illusory,
It is enough—it is enough!—
For us to reflect on all the things that make us up.

Man is one great reason. His life, his love, his hope—
These are what he strives for in the end,
And what
Sustain him through thick and thin,
And what
Preserve his strength and sense.

The whole of what we are is but a temporary action.
Let not the dread of thought allow inaction.
Move through sloth and overcome it with thought;
Reasonably think, and obtain what you sought.

89.

So short of time, so many desires to opine.
That is the whole of our soul,
An endless searching to and fro,
Never able to rightly align
With the heart and mind.

Why do I continue then if all is done for on my end?
Because I’ve seen things within my experience that send
All despair out of my soul, and render me to hope and faith.

There is no end but the overtaking of death, but death cannot be
Such a bad thing so long as we live our lives with clear eyes to see.

All the things we hope and dream
Appear to us like cope and steam,
But let not that thought pervert your mind,
Nor let that vapor go from your dear eye.

90.

So little material do I have at my hands
That none of my works come out as planned.
Not even my well-considered thoughts make their way to the page,
For I am timid in presenting myself with my own ideas;
It’s always an embarrassing sight to behold, to look upon some trifle already done.

Nothing ever holds its own against the sea of time;
Those works great enough to sustain
Do so for their truth and tradition—
Little else gets at the heart of a labor:
Only what’s savored by cultured minds
Appears in its truest light from on high.

Alas, I must be alone in my darkness;
Forever alone, woefully alone, not a soul in sight,
And all my days are spent ruminating upon my plight.

Were I to be delivered from life, I would consider that
A rather happy thing, for everything I see is intolerable to me.
Walk among the bones in graves, and quickly discover the end
Of your own life—that rather demure fate, to end as a heap of dust for dirt.
What a marvel that anyone finds reason enough to maintain themselves
Amidst so much misery and evil. In this, we have hope and faith to thank.

91.

Senseless dreams and endless visions
Make up
The whole of my mind’s cognitions.

In the gray whilst it be day,
In the bright whilst it be night.
I am the opposite of everyone I encounter.

My mind labors here and there,
Acquiring this and forgetting that,
But in the end all reason is not enough
To save a man from his own despair,
And only in song can he revert
Lest he resort to some drastic measure
Which fall out of his wretched mind—
Not thinking straight—
And cause him to do something he’ll regret afterwards.

Ah! Such a magnificent world we live in: endless variations upon misery,
Improvisations everywhere, hopeful souls wanting to be
Nothing more than what their confused minds tell them they’re to be;
All this, mind you, sustained on hope from without,
A source glowing bright, but whose flame cannot be seen with mortal eyes.

Where is that special twig, that green leaf, which, if found, will usher in an age of peace upon the world?
Could such a thing exist in our world?
Though I’m not one to entertain ideas not my own,
I like that childhood tale, for it endears itself to a child,
And makes them go searching all around for that twig or leaf.
In their actions are seen the purest hope, the most loving agitation—
Clawing up the dirt, dirtying their little hands, but all done with fun and hope.
Ah! Sweet hope, dearest thing, without you—and without love—this life would be a joke.

92.

Man is not content with one idea alone.
He always feels the need to say more,
To do more, to be more, to establish more—
For whom and to what end, I fear, is never asked.
As he walks about the Earth blindly, as if veiled
From head to toe in darkness, as black as night,
Shielded from the vanity of the world, but lost to himself as well.

Wretched is man, and forever is his hope increasing upwards,
Never to find what is sought, and always more to be fought
Within himself and the world around him.
Man is a constant agitation to himself,
And nothing he does eases his soul.
Always must we search, endless is the dearth;
What vanity we make upon ourselves whilst we live.
All is but wind, blown from east to west,
High up in the sky, and descending down the inclines.

Hope is but a fretful dream, and though man seems
Content with what he has, his nature demands more
From him—even should he have half the Earth, man will
Play himself some nasty trick and beckon unto nature,
Demand from her all her secrets,
And in return destroy her.

Such audacity: the boldness one must have
To seek command of the Earth and elements;
We shall always fail at this endeavor,
However,
For nature lies above man
In the same way man lies
Above an ant.
That is what we are: ants! Many ants
All walking about, gathering objects and
Bringing them home for us to use them.
Such a dreary, sad life we all lead at present.

93.

We are constantly striving upwards
While also constantly pushed backwards.
When I reflect on the state of man and find
That there is little by which to ease his mind,
I am made resentful towards the world
And hate all that oppresses the soul.

Life does not live on bread alone,
And neither does the soul of man who is
Nourished on all that is fruitful and cultured.
What the times provide for our inspiration
Offers very little of substance, not worth
The pain to make some gold out of silver.

94.

Some days we find ourselves in full command of our powers,
Whilst at others we barely find the words to speak of simple things.
I know not what all these lines may come of,
But while I write them I feel I’m doing good
In attempting to outgrow old molds in which
I forced myself to remain for so long,
All of which was very detrimental to me,
And served, rather, to distract from that which
I knew in my heart to be right, but which
I lacked the courage to follow through with
Out of deference to tradition and old
Models, born from the minds of “great men”
Which in the end made me neither “great” nor proud.
I was making myself ridiculous, in fact,
By trying to outdo what I knew
Was not for me—in my heart I felt that.

I always feel too much, I feel,
And achieve nothing great as a result.
My desire to please everyone
Only makes me intolerable to myself—
I do no good, and curse myself
For trying that for which my genius had
No inclination or bent: such sad results.

95.

Cast aside are the clouds of old
And new is made the sky’s mold;
When heaven sings of beauty bright
My soul soars in heavenly flight;
Up toward the blue does bliss ensue,
And I, like some lovesick fool,
Follow it to the ends of the Earth,
Where light is sparse
And holds only rocks;
Where beasts roam unknown to man,
As old as time’s hourglass sand.

Oh, how green the trees appear to me
When sunlight, strong, enters my eyes to see,
The bark, the stick, the branch, the soil, and the trunk—
All God-made, done in a state of heavenly thought.

96.

I heard the sound of birds singing,
Their lovely song and flight whizzing
Past my window whilst I was sitting,
Pondering the world and all its misgivings.

At once was I put aright by them
And made to see the joy of life again.

Simplicity! Simplicity! Always strong.
Stand not in my way, you who have held me too long,
Misery—I shall not be made the slave of you,
Nor shall I bow to the things you do.
My life is my own, and in that I find my rest;
Simple living and reading are best:
Friends, games, cards, trees, and love
All endear the soul to things above;

In the great expanse that twirls around
Those heavenly objects that move round,
Shining brighter than a thousand suns,
Louder than a thousand sounds,
All shaped by God, well done,
Sustain the hope of man, no joy undone.
No love’s labor lost, no song unsung.

97.

So many sights do my eyes see before me,
Now made clear and showing me all their glory—
Glory unknown to me for a time when stress
Had overtaken all my thoughts with great arrest;
No more, however; no longer do I sustain those blows
Which used to strike me like the head of an arrow.

I now lie in the repose of my thoughts,
Seeking what was lost and what must be sought
In order that I can live in some harmony,
Far from all disunity and division.

The clouds work their magic as my eyes gaze
Out into the far distant sky, in its changing phase,
With water and evaporation collecting in shapes—
In various forms, figures, and hues, all displaced
By the winds, which scatter and move the whole,
And as they carry on, lift my soul.

98.

All that riding in the open air
Has effects on me in ways very fair.
I love to see the way that nature plays
In all childish whims and wit,
Made for heads unfit
To labor in long and tiring ways.

In the way of the trees do I find my salvation true,
Amongst the grass, the dirt, the bugs, and dew,
All my senses return to me
In all their helpful proclivities,
Knowing just what to do—
Inspiring me to pursue
All that which is the whole of life,
Sending inborn fears to flight,
Ending all discord and strife,
Helping me attain great heights.

99.

Blessed is the holy Father who lies above us.
In Him does our salvation lie, never without us.
Oh God, holy Father of all things under heaven,
May we never veer from Your side; may You send us
Far from evil lands, steer us from evil people, cap our ears,
Remove our fears, preserve our spirits, and strengthen the good we hear.

In spirit shall You be with us; with You we shall never tarry in vain.
The labor of life knows its pangs and shames,
But man overcomes all that is lame—
So long as he has You near his heart, and never feels in his heart disdain
For all the works You do on Earth and in heaven;
From You are we, and in You shall we see
What is far from man, but near in sight,
Dressed up in glorious light,
Inspired by Your loving power—too bright
For man to capture in his mind,
But just right for him with firm faith, upright,
And with conviction of Your sight.

100.

Praise holy heaven and the clouds,
That dwell with God on high in mirth and bliss.
Heavenly song does resound all around
And fill the world with pleasures not amiss
To those with a heart open to the Lord, our God.
Father high and great, ye be.
Love us as we love You, and we shall never fear what is to come to us.

Oh God, know our hearts, change our minds, bless our souls, and save us from ourselves.
Help those in need—the needy among the poor indeed—and us who pray in times of grief.
Oh Lord, Father and heavenly host, do my plights—which cause me great strife—
Appear as nothing to You, You who know all things, and who know of my pangs of woe?
Oh Lord, let not these cries fall on deaf ears, on dead spirits, on helpless wretches.

My air is as precious as my thoughts, and I desire nothing more than full command of the necessities,
In order that I may praise the works You do!
Praise God, HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! This is Thy praise, and this You are.
Drive out my miseries, oh God! Let my lamentations to You not be like wind, but like the honest attempts of a wicked sinner.
My faults are not mine own in full.

So often must the world change me and make me turn against You.
Though I strive with all my heart to maintain the peace and do the good,
I am only human—not some perfect angel—and so go astray more often than I wish.
Oh Lord, merciful Father, save me from what is not my own fault, and what I cannot help but endure miserably.

He who rides on clouds in heaven, and who knows when the sparrow has fallen,
Dearest, most holy, most high God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—
Let not all these praises to You be like foam upon the sea.
May my words, already known to You, give me strength,
As You take pity on my plight, and turn me from a soldier in flight to a soldier firm in faith!

Praise God! Praise Holy God! Our Father!
Bless Him.
Amen.

101.

Let not my heart come into being without Your grace, blessed Lord.
Oh, hark unto me, all those pretty things of Earth;
Let me see you in the full beauty of your youth.
In old and young alike shall I find the view of pleasant things beautiful.
Nearest and dearest to my heart, oh God, You are to me.
Never leave me; always steer me, always lead me, and may I find in You all that I seek for life.
You are my rock, my Savior, my flesh and blood alike.

Dearest God, none come into the world but through Your grace,
And none leave this wretched place without first judgment by You.
Spare, dear God, spare those who do wicked but praise You;
Let the sins of the wicked be forgiven, so long as it is You they seek in their heart of hearts;
Save those who have always wanted to be one with You, oh God,
And always ensure those who do wicked are punished for their selfish ways.

This world of Yours, Your great creation in six days, is too glorious to cast aside, as if it meant nothing.
Holy Father God, to You are we always near;
In Your mind are we always thought dear;
In Your heart are we always brought to in times severe.

Blessed is He who saves us from our own inequity,
And leaves to shame and nothingness those who do ill in Your name.

Holy is the Father,
Blessed is His Son,
Sacred is His Spirit.

On these things we lavish our praise.
Holy be the Three—blessed everlastingly.
Amen!

102.

Must the world shine so brightly whilst I am in misery?
Oh holy Father, my Lord and my God,
Save me from all these vexing thoughts which encompass me.

As I move throughout the day at present, I am beset with no other thought but despair.
In fear and trembling did I rouse myself from slumber, that cousin of death,
And in that sleep I still wished to return to my slothful slumber,
For in truth, oh God, in that moment, I wanted nothing but my life to come to an end.

Oh, no misery is greater for man than to be unable to find happiness among happy sights and joyous people.
Oh, vexing anhedonia—you trouble me like a plague to Europe.

My life is but an instant in the eye of God,
But still, dear Lord, see my life nonetheless, and exalt it,
For I have felt much, seen much, suffered greatly—
And though I am not now that age which once moved Earth and heaven,
What I am, I am, and in that do I find my desire to live, in order that I may praise You through the doing of Your works.

Oh God, heavenly passion, heavenly light, heavenly beauty, heavenly flight—
Oh, how I feel the world so much at present, dearest God.
I type with the speed of Satan (my keyboard is on fire),
And in this do I seek to spill my heart for You,
In order that the sight of my blood may be a precious thing to You,

Oh God, my God, my Savior and salvation. Let not all these vexing sights and visions, these evil thoughts and hateful illusions,
Be the things that turn me from the world, that make me hate life, my friends, my family, my love—
No, God, dear God, preserve me from all these wicked things.

Save me, God, save me! May I never be without Your strength.
So long as I have my faith in Thee,
Holy shall my name forever be.
God is King! Praise Him! Amen!

103.

What are my words to me but air in the end?
In the sight of the end of days do all my shouts come to nothing.
I am lost amidst a violent sea, and have only God to protect me.
How hopeless all things seem without His loving hand;
How hateful do I become to myself when I act against my nature and against God.

Oh God, my God, save me from all iniquity; preserve me in strength and spirit—let my faith and reason overcome these earthly plights.
Never leave me, oh God. Show me the way, and I will follow Your light like a moth to the flame.
Nay better, I am—to You, oh Lord—like a moth that flies towards the moon;
Though I soar high into the sky,
I never do attain that great divine—
With You, however, oh Lord,
I am made good and pure,
And in that do I rise from my ashes great,
Aspire to things impossible in the present date,
And ascend far beyond all the men who live presently.

God, without You, my sense is lost, and I can find no words of hope or joy to give in praise of Thee.
Woe is me, woe is me, the day I lose what I feel in my heart.
NEVER AGAIN!
My life shall be sustained on hope and faith.
Always shall my words ring out true to the way,
And make open hearts obtain understanding for themselves again.

104.

Holy is the sight of heavenly things.
My mind resounds with sounds that sing
Of the divinity of nature.

In the whole of Earth do I find my place of rest.
God is there, and in Him I am pleased.
I walk among the groves in harmony with the trees,
All of which see my spirit and praise my ways to the lees.

In wine is there much truth,
And in man is much, forsooth,
For his heart feels all things which he places around him,
And he is moved by the conversation of many birds near him.

The sweet songbird sounds the coming of pleasant day,
The weather hums and man awakes—as if for the first time—
In the world. Oh, glorious world, how nigh
You are to me; to offer me so much splendor and joy
That I hoist up the pain of life and make a pleasant noise:
Ah! What a world indeed, shining so beautifully among the trees,
Reflecting off the water with a glow not bestowed upon itself,
But for man to pick up and reflect for himself.

That is the beauty of nature:
It allows all men their due,
Makes him work for what is good.
To see in a single stick the whole confluence of Earth—
That is the poet’s art, and nature’s craft;
Man labors laboriously and with haste,
But his heart makes all timidness chafe,
Offering man some great raft
To ride along the glistening river upon,
To observe all the glitter as it shines perpetually upon the blue,
And rouses the soul to the heights of spirit—all new!
Let that be life! Forever to be loved and ever renewed.

105.

In Your holy sight do I find my hope, oh Lord.
Never make me hate myself, dear God.
Never allow me to do evil against myself or to others.
May I always be saved from myself by Your benevolence, dear God.
Wicked are my ways and regretful is my heart.

I am a stranger everywhere I walk upon this Earth;
Even in the company of strangers and friends do I find myself quite distant.
I can get no hope from the voices of those who steer themselves not in Your path, oh God.
Give me the power to forgive, to live, to live, to simply live—oh Lord!

I hate this life I lead at times: so empty and confused, so different and so myself that I must suffer at the hands of the ignorant who themselves are foolish and selfish, but in a hateful way;
My sin is my own, I admit that now; but You, dear God, are the path I try to walk in.
In Your light do I seek to overcome all that is evil in the world presently.

I can never stop writing praises to You, in order that I may convince myself that the more I praise You, the sooner I may be saved, and thus rid myself from this accursed world, this sinful flesh, all these hateful thoughts which spring in my mind as I’m forced to endure the wicked evilness of EVERYONE!

Let me sing like David with his harp for You, oh Lord.
Give me wisdom like Solomon, so that I may praise the vanity of life, oh Lord.
Give me the age of Methuselah, so that I may live to see countless lifetimes of suffering, oh Lord.
Give me the strength of Samson, so that I may bear the weight of so many countless lifetimes of suffering, oh Lord.
I want nothing but the ability to praise You constantly, oh Lord.

May I always write to You with sound and fury—
Never ending, never tiring, always aspiring to higher and higher things, dear Lord.
Oh Lord, Lord, Lord, my God and Father—
May I find the will to do all I set before You in my verse.
Praise God, most holy Father.

106.

I tremble in my heart when I think of the Lord.
I stride along the Earth and walk with God Almighty.
Praise be to His name, holy Father high in heaven.
I know of so few able to praise You rightly,
And in all I do I find my power wanes when it attempts to judge the just way to praise You.
Oh Lord God, how far above me do You ascend, and how small, like an ant, do I appear to You.
Never are my praises enough, just like my labors in this life.

Will I achieve the love of my life, oh God?
Oh God, please let it be so. Give me the courage to live, to escape my wretched state at present, and to become one with her, as I will become one with You after death.
I’m ready to die, but not yet.
Give me death, oh Lord, but not yet.
Give me clarity, oh Lord.

Where has the light gone from my eyes? When out of Your sight, dear God, nothing appears half as bright as when I have You in my heart.

All my contemplations mean nothing should they not be done alongside You and Your grace.
Let me seek You, and in seeking You shall I find You, and in finding You shall I have life, oh God.
Love me as I love You, and I will never stop loving You, dearest God.

Oh Lord, allow me to find my path, and to stop in the ways of sloth and evilness.
I am but a rambler now, but I want to build myself a new foundation—to overcome all that holds me back now, so that I can forget all that sin from which I was sprung.
Oh Lord, better it would have been for me never to have lived,
But I live now, and that gives me very little hope:
Alas! Alas, oh Lord, I have You to think of, and in that is my faith secured from doubt and vanity.
All of this Earth shall come to dust, but in You shall I rise from the ashes and forever remain immortal and pure in my heart;
Blessed the day I leave Earth, in order that I may be one with the God that moves my soul at present.

Let me LIVE! OH GOD. Allow me the courage to live. Let me work for my dearest R—: with her do I want to be one on this Earth, and after we have both passed, to be one with You and her in heaven.
Oh, were that my fate, I would be the happiest human among mankind.
Allow me the power to achieve all that, oh Lord, and never will I know fear or see dread before my eyes.

Blessed and great is the Lord.
On JAH we live—
In JAH we trust—
Out of many, JAH!
Praise the Lord.

107.

Call me Asaph!
I am a singer for the Lord, and want to praise none but Him.
Oh dearest God, our Father, protect us from all our iniquity.
I despise what I do when not in the thought of You.
My heart opens wide, but I feel no lover enter it from this Your world.
Only in You, dear Lord, do I find any hope at all.

I’m tired with life, and can say with the heathen that I have lived long enough.
I want for nothing but courage and faith, oh Lord, in order that I may live like a man among beasts—
For that is all I see when I look out onto the world:
A raving mad pack of dogs and selfish monsters who despise with a passion Your words, oh Lord.
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Save them, for they shall repent when they see You.

Oh Lord! Blessed and most holy of all things,
Allow Your servant and sinner to work the ways of Your word well;
Whilst I walk in Your light, may I never be given over to the dark,
Which so often befalls those who are wicked, and who do wicked in Your name, oh Lord.

God, Blessed Life and Holy Spirit: never leave my side, always be there to provide for me, always encourage when I am wicked, always listen when I am in despair, always love when I am in hate caused by the world.

Never do I wish to go against Your word, oh God.
To go against You is to go against myself, for in the end You command all, dearest Lord.
Maintain my faith as I struggle with life, and You shall always have me as a servant of Your deeds, oh God.
Praise Him who protects and loves us: greatest God, highest Lord, the Father.

108.

Let our love for You, dear God, be as long as the sun.
May we be with the moon in endurance, never to fade from sight,
Always to be watching, revolving around the Earth, always a spot of light in the night to which we fix our eyes in wonderment.
Shall we always feel enchanted with what You are, dear God.
Forever and ever do we wish to call out to You, and to name Your praises.
Never leave us, be with us, preserve us, maintain us, hold us, to infinity and beyond.
Beyond, in fact, infinity itself—for concepts fail to comprehend You.
Only love seems to most closely capture what You are, oh Lord, dearest God who dwells in heaven.

Give those who love You love,
Give those who hate You hate,
Allow all who seek You in faith to find You waiting there, patiently.
Shall we never be in want for You;
Shall our hearts only lust for You;
Shall our minds only think of You;
Shall our souls only be with You.

Dearest God, these are what we ask of You. We know You are there, and we know You hear us.
Please, oh Lord, forgive us our ways and accept us into Your light.
Sinners we are, repenters You shall find us in Your sight.

109.

We constantly fail to do good works in the name of the Lord.
Oh, how wretched the state of man is, always seeking but never finding.
The whole of life seems a continuous game of seeking, from which the hidden things are never found.
Oh Lord, show us Your way, and with Your light shall we see through the darkness of this world;
In Your light shall we see the path; all that was obscure before will be clear.

Holy is the Lord, and blessed is His day.
I look out upon the grass and hay
And find in it all some divinity which speaks to me and my soul;
At the sight, my heart flies upwards in passion,
And I am made a fool by all my poetic waxings, inspired by the beauty of such visions.
Oh, if I may become a fool, then let me remain one, for the joys imbibed through our eyes whilst in nature are the greatest things of all.
In these sights are my hopes restored;
I drink the wine of happiness, and sing of women in song afterwards.
In God do I know all these good things come, and in them I partake—
In order that I may do His works by taking part in His creation.

Let His love become my own love toward the things which I see with my eyes in this world.
The light of God is too bright for me, mortal that I am,
But soon enough, with the passing of time, I shall die, and in that will this shell be shed, and the kernel of my soul shall flee toward God.
I am driven by the beauties of life, and in them is my reality set aright.

The clouds, the birds, the sea, and the squirrel—
Of these things do I partake greatly;
In them are my soul, my life, and my hope.
In faith and hope—faith and hope; faith and hope—those things restore me from sin and steer me away from the wicked.
Oh me, oh life, that is my life—the joy taken part of in nature in spite of strife.
Let that be my life forever, oh Lord!

110.

Leaves give me hope, for the parting day does sing brightly on the blade as the sun fades away.
I turn my head up to the sky and wonder greatly—sitting there, again, wondering why.

Oh, heavenly palace this Earth is for man! So many places on it he may be: a place to call home, his own.
So many people to meet, things to do, passions to feel, loves to kindle, and sorrows to spill tears over.

Oh, woe is me, and woe is man, when he remembers how temporary it all is.
Oh, woe to us who seek for fun with the time we have; we who sing in spite of all ends anyway.
Let us overcome our strife through living life.
That is all people have ever done.

Much like these verses now, which I cull from my head with you in mind—my dearest sublime, oh heavenly vision, greater than the Earth itself.
Woe is me, oh me, to be as I am to you—so far, so near; in the heart, a dart has pierced, but in you I sustain and maintain; no blood which exits the wound will ever cease my beating for you!

Joy to the world and those who live! So much to do, to endure—let it all be pure, and with fun should we indulge the senses, just a bit.
Not too much, not too far, but just enough to see the limits of our heart. Nothing more, and no harm shall befall us.

Oh, joyous we shall be at that. Come now, dearest, let us draw nearer to each other, and forget ourselves for a while, with each other, for each other, forever and ever!
Amen!

111.

Hear us in our prayers, oh Lord.
In You we find our hope, in You all that we were, are, and will be.
Blessed is he who fears the Lord, knows how to praise, knows when he has done wrong in His presence, and seeks forgiveness for what he has brought upon himself.

Often has man wrought things which he regrets in the end.
So often does life make a fool of us, dispelling any hopeful notion that we are in the right in the end.
No! For God we are always in the wrong, for so long as His perfect love exists, we will always fall short of Him.

Alas, dear Lord, holy God, Father in heaven, look upon our faults kindly, and forgive us who do wrong whilst we profess our love for You.
Never shall I be turned from You, oh God, so long as my faith is maintained, and my heart sustains the blows of life.
The slings and arrows of egregious fortune turn our once hopeful spirits into grievous wailings of regret.

Man is always in the wrong: never forget that!
Still, though, do not fail to live because you shall sin.
Always place trust in God in the end, for He is the rock, and with Him all will go right with us—so long as we have faith.
Glorious Father who art in heaven:
With You shall we survive,
With You shall we endure,
With You shall we strive, and
With You shall we prosper.
That is all we can ask for in the end.
Amen.

112.

Spring forth and sing us a mighty praise of the Earth, dearest psalmist.
Tell us of what God has done, what His creations have brought, and what His feelings are for us—His greatest creation.

Oh, how noble do the streets seem when the light gleams off the concrete sheens.
Happy is my heart made by the tidings of joy and song of the psalmist.
Whilst I live amidst all this concrete and brick, the flowers still poke up from the ground,
Cracking the surface all around, and bathing the nearby slab with beauty—abounding in colorful hues and wonderful scents.

Ah yes, all this I see when I hear the words the psalmist sings.
Dearer to the Earth do I become at the meaning of God’s word.
I see what has been, done, and did, and thank God for all that has come when it did.

I love this life I live—I really do! Though surrounded by misery most of my time, I have never forgotten the joy of life.
In my heart rests God within, and in Him do I stand firm on the rock He gave,
From which I may leap should I so desire, and say, whilst in the drop: “God! Let me not down into the abyss.”
And God listens to me, and preserves me;
For He knows that while I sin, I do, in fact, live within Him, and do my best to make amends to Him.
That is all my life could be: in God, in His love, and in my faith in Him.
Toward this do I live in the end.

113.

Trust in things unseen and the world shall come unto you.
No ghost is ever not seen, so long as you believe in you.
Airy phantoms that pass before our eyes, visions totally sublime,
In the mouth of the world do I dwell; in its darkness do I spell—
Amidst my candlelight—the meaning of the world for me, what it seems and what it is with me.

The meaning of life? Love! That seems it. Only in Him who preserves and knows all.
Lord, forgive me my sins, knower of my every deed and darkest fantasy.

My life is like a light to the world,
My own brightness shines like a pearl;
For this, I give God His thanks—without Him, I am naught and never would have been;
Oh, what a misery that would have been,
To not have seen the world in all its shapes and colorful hues:
To not have seen the dew
Upon the grass,
Or the clouds
Within the sky,
Or the snow
Atop the hills.

All would have been unknown to me, and would have seemed like nothing.
But I live now, and must turn all this experience and pain into something.
I must! I will!
Praise God I will,
For these thoughts
To carve through
The Earth like a rill.

114.

Words affect me in ways few other things can.
In them do I find the meaning of the Earth,
And in that do I become endeared to life.
I live for those things which increase my capacity to understand life.

I find only in the Lord the highest a man can receive.
Supreme, infinite love—that is what I see before my mind as I write.
Never is my heart empty of God when forced to express reality.
I see everything in all its drab mundanity,
But I prosper nonetheless: God is with me, and with him who seeks Him.
Yes! In God—only in God!—I find the rock secure, the tabernacle populated with prayers, and the ground before the wailing wall in tears.

Ah yes, ah me, oh life, oh world—I come before you all, and demand that I be made bold before you, in order that I may please the Lord.
Give me, oh God most high, the breath of Your life, so that my spirits may rise like the tides and air, sublime—
Atop the highest peaks of this Earth we are lost for breath;
No matter, You will provide, and this heart shall not cease to beat
So long as my faith is in You and the world, Your creation.

Highest heaven,
Holy bright,
Shine on me
With all Your light,
And send them
Who know not You
To the school of God:
In order that they may see
And love life once again.

115.

Help me in the day of my darkest hours, oh Lord.
Walk I do through the groves of misery,
Shadowed by the veil of darkness,
Cast at me are evil glances,
Menacing in aspect,
Perfidious in tone.
None of this can be good for the soul, oh Lord.

Save me in the night of my brightest fright, oh Lord.
None do good but You, and I am but a follower in Your path,
A shadow born from Your light—such darkness I possess, and such suffering do I endure from all this;
This war that I am, myself and all that is dead within me, soon to be nothing but misery.
Alas, let me live on, oh Lord.

Spare me, oh Lord, from my enemies, from my fears, from my regrets, from all that I have lost and all that I once sought, no more.
The time passes too slowly at such an hour:
Freedom, at last, from all that is evil—such is the lot I wish to set my tent upon.

Oh Lord, my rock and salvation, do preserve me from all that I fear and all that wishes to turn me against You.
The world is made full of sinners, and hateful are they towards Your grace.
Never will I turn, though, oh Lord; never will all the evilness of the world make me turn against You.
Though I hate the fact that I must live apart from You as I do now, oh Lord, let me do Your works as best I can whilst I live—
Hold me fast to Your love, give me faith, strong, in You, oh Lord.
Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Oh God! You are my savior.

116.

Bountiful are my fortunes and great are my misfortunes.
The two intertwined make up me.
I am the misery the world sets upon me;
But in You, oh Lord, I have faith enough—the power of my love for You is incalculable.

Here and there I traverse the whole of my life in my mind,
What do I find?
I have been a man worthy of much pity, lost as I am at present, confused as I will be in the future, sad as I was in the past.
Oh, so much I had to endure to be as I am now. So much, so little in the end.
But in You, God, I was saved—from myself and the world.
This world could not play me for a fool, and neither could it steer away my love for You.
Dearest Father, holy God, in such moments as now, when I think about the past, and all I have undergone to get here, I cannot be more thankful for those obstacles.

Blessed I was with a firm mind and strong body.
I had a resolute constitution.
My faith was firm, my foundation secure, my love passionate, my confidence bold—
And though I confused myself many times along Your path, oh Lord, never once did I ever see myself away from You.
As I said, confused is all I was, and what sinner doesn’t fall to such depths through confusion?
Yes! All sin is but confusion—a momentary darkness cast over the soul in which man cannot see himself in You, dearest Lord.
Spare us this misery, oh Lord, and we shall cling to You in love eternal.

117.

Shall I never be free from all my misery?
I call unto happiness like a child does its mother,
But I hear no reply, and so must go on crying,
Forever abandoned I am, and forever alone I shall be;
Born in darkness I was, born in sin I was, born in misery, suffering supreme and even holy;
Alas, oh Lord, in You I found my place, my way, my path by which to travel, even should there be no light to see with.
I went about in darkness—the weary way of the world: a dark and treacherous forest full of thorns and snares!—
And yet, still did I find Your light, oh Lord.

God the Father and blessed Spirit which dwells within all men’s hearts:
Upon You do I call,
Upon You do I pray,
Upon You do I dream,
Upon You do I see,
Upon You do I know.
In my heart—that is, in me—do I know You to be true.
I have the faith to see You though my eyes never see what You are;
I have the faith to hear You though my ears never hear what You are;
I have the faith to know You though my mind never comprehends what You are.
Holy Father and creator of me, in You do I place all my hope for life, and You do I desire to be with at the end of it.
Grant me this, oh Lord, and I shall never stray from Your path whilst I walk the Earth.

118.

Long are my days and short are my powers.
Dear Lord, how impossible do I find the times.
Never is my mind without some past misery upon it.
Always are my days spoiled by the thought of some past regret.
How difficult do I make my life—brought up in bad times, surrounded by ignorant people, hated by myself, in a nation full of fools captured by wicked vices.
Ah, how I hate my life at times.
Oh, how impossible are all these signs.
I have no savior but You, oh God.

Why must I endure what I did not call upon myself?
I must, I must, I will. That is my life, and no other way can I overcome my misery but through it, oh Lord.
You set up the world, and I must endure it.
You set them up so that I may knock them down with my clumsiness.
If only, though, oh Lord, it were possible for me to endure life without having to turn my misery into some great fortune.

Why must I think contradictorily in order to be happy in life—if I’m happy at all is really another question.
I suspect You set the world up in such a way, oh Lord, in order for people to come to know You in the first place.
You make our misery in order that we may do Your works more faithfully and thankfully.
Grace, holy grace, bless us on this dreaded day, and still our hearts amidst the violence of so much chaos.
In the beginning did You make the world, and
In the end did You make man to die;
So must it be.
Thy will be done.

119.

Goodbye, for now, dearest morn of this world.
In the light of the world do I find only darkness.
In You, oh Lord—You are my only true brightness.
No light of my own is great enough to sustain this darkness.
Alas, oh Lord, lend Your faithful servant a hand, in order that I may endure this darkness through Your light.

Dearest God, forgive me my sins and quickly assent to my request for aid.
Oh Lord, where were You when I was in my darkness?
Where were You when I suffered as I did at the hands of this cruel world?
Where were You when I held strong to You, and was still left to misery?
Ah, how strong my suffering was, and how strong my repentance was.

The things we suffer in this life are forever to be unknown to us, I suppose.
All our doubts and miseries are meant only for us, and the nothingness that follows our life is all the reward we’ll receive.
Alas, dear God, let it not be so. Let not this suffering be for naught.
In You do we place our faith, and in You do we get through life at all.

In order to act, I must first believe in something upon which to act and within—confined as I am by space and time and nature’s laws overall.
I choose to believe, then, in You, oh Lord.
Hateful is life towards me and great are my sufferings, but in You, oh Lord, I find my salvation, my rock, the place from which I shall never be turned away.

Everything in this life is bad, and You are the only good, dear Lord:
The Way!
The Truth!
The Life!
Nothing, and
Everything.
Alpha, and
Omega.
Till time brings us our end, may we remain strong in You, dearest God.
Blessed Father,
Amen, and Amen again!

120.

In order to endure life, one must endure misery.
The greatest struggles are those which are suffered through without knowing the cause of such misery.
Misery is a silly thing; for whilst it disturbs our peace and makes us regret life at times, we still find within it a hint of You, oh Lord.
Even in our lowest moments are we never without You, oh Lord.
Our hearts shall bleed for You, oh Lord,
And in all this bleeding will we fill a pool for You, oh Lord.
This pool shall be what our life is: a vital source from which our life is sustained.
Blessed to us is the blood of Your Son, and in Him do we obtain true and everlasting life.

Dearest Father who art in heaven,
To You do we direct our gaze,
To You do we direct our praise,
To You do we appeal our case, and
To You do we appeal our cause.
In all this do we find our life: a moment in time, searching whilst lost in place, never seeming to find the time, and always confused as to where it all went by whilst we lived straight through it.

Oh Lord, holy Father, never are we equal to the demands of life;
And always shall we be in the wrong so long as we’re forced to endure the contradictions we encounter at every turn.
To be happy seems, in itself, a contradiction, for we all know how temporary it shall be for us.
To be sad is the way we shall head,
And in the end, when we’re all dead—
There shall we find the final answers we sought whilst we lived at all.

121.

Our life is not so bad as it seems.
All things have their time and place;
All things reveal their hidden face;
Time is but a vain sensation,
And all our woes are but false impressions.
In You, God Almighty, do we truly find peace eternal.
Eternal joy, knowing not the strain of this life, and the pleasure of everlasting love in You.
That is what all true believers must desire in the end: Your loving-kindness, oh Lord.

God most high, protect us from evil and wickedness, save us when we go astray, and preserve us in faith in You.
Never leave our side, and always remain steadfast in Your love for us, oh Lord.
I cast no doubt upon Your love, but in my heart, I feel at times You forget man exists, dear God.
I know not why I sin, but I wish to be forgiven, in order that I may live the upright, noble path, oh God.
Let not all that I see pass before my eyes without meaning.

Give me the courage to live, oh Lord, and make me bold in the face of so much uncertainty whilst I walk through this wretched, fallen, depraved, selfish, evil world.
I hardly know myself when I enter the world, dear God.
I enter into it as a child does school for the first time, with innocence and uncertainty.
I dread this life because of it.
I know nothing.
I am nothing when compared with You, oh Lord—
But give Your servant a chance:
Give me the power, oh Lord,
To overcome every doubt,
To make myself proud at having dared to live.
All this I know, and all this I feel, and all this must I forever cry about and wish I was without.
Until that day comes, oh Lord—until all my embarrassment for having lived is vanquished from my mind—
Preserve me and strengthen me with resolve and courage to do what I must, for myself, for my family, for her (my lover), and for the world overall.

122.

Do not be ashamed at life.
The Lord loves you.
The Lord loves me.
The Lord loves everybody.
In Him are we saved, and in His love are we truly blessed.

I endure this life only for the Lord’s sake.
My sake is worthless in the eyes of Him who made the world.
Only in God is my salvation secured, and only in my faith toward Him shall I forever be secure in my strength for life itself.

Oh, how I curse my fate for having ever been born at times;
But then I remember the Lord, and feel light—like my shoulders have been unburdened of the weight of life itself.
I shall always live on with faith and happiness secure, so long as I have love in my heart for God and myself.
Never shall this world bend me to its whims.

How do I endure life?
By living in faith, with firm faith and an honest heart.
I see no need to lie to myself anymore about reality.
I have woken up from a terrible nightmare, and now the light of the morning sun is more precious to my eyes than it ever was before.

I shall now sing of the Holy Father, so far high above the clouds, atop the heights of heaven itself, resting peacefully, looking down and seeing all things with love.
I sing the song of my love; my life shall be the first movement of this great symphony, and the closing cadenza to this long coda shall be found in me—in my love for God.

123.

Forever must I be without light so long as I live without God in mind.
My rock and my Savior, to You I owe my life, and to You do I owe my love.
My life is such an intolerable thing at times, and always must I find myself against that which I know is right.

I am, and shall always be, in the wrong so long as I lose the light of You, oh Lord.
Never shall I be able to live so long as I think only for myself—
In my selfishness do I forget others, whom You, oh Lord, command us to love as we love ourselves.

Never shall I be capable of true happiness until I detach myself from sin.
Thus must I forever be unhappy.
Alas, so it is, though: man will never find true, lasting happiness in this life.
Only in You, oh Lord—and after death, at that—will we truly know no misery. And that day cannot come upon me sooner.

Oh God, let my life end quickly—bring me to You sooner rather than later.
I have never been happy in life.
Always have I been the end of some crude joke, or an unstoppable misfortune, or some accident which could not be avoided by me.
Always have I suffered, and never have I known four weeks of true contentment or ease.
So long as I live, I will suffer the pangs of this life unnecessarily—
Unnecessarily, because this life was not my choice, but came upon me from without.
I was pulled by an invisible string into consciousness—and now I must continuously be pulled by it as I live,
And the day that thin thread is cut, so too shall my life end.
Oh Lord, cut it when You will.
At this point, whenever is fine with me—just let it be quick, and nothing more.
Blessed is He who knows and loves all.
Amen.

124.

I shall always sing the truth of my heart so long as it is within me.
I must sing the truth out of me if it is to become familiar to me again.

Oh, how this life tries my patience.
At the end of the day, I am tired,
And want nothing to do at all the next day—
Alas, I must live on in spite of my not wanting to.

This life is a great misery unto me, and I hate all that I must do in order to keep up with it.
I wash my hands of all my inequity, but only in God do I find them truly clean—clean forever.
The longer I endure, the more my misery spreads and comes at my heart violently.
Save me from this wickedness, oh Lord.
Give my soul resolve, and make me see life with a newfound love—
A love which only You know and perform, oh Lord.
Let me endure, and let the spirit of Your source come before me;
May it forever be as it is, in You, oh God.

Such a tragedy I lead. My misfortunes are such that I feel I will never get out of them, and I lack the resolve to get out of them myself.
At such moments, death is the only option. Indeed, it has always been the true answer;
But I stop myself, oh Lord, for I know it is better to endure and do good in Your name whilst I live, rather than depart from my earthly stay prematurely.
I prefer to give You the burden of taking me from this world, oh Lord, rather than performing the most necessary and holy duty myself.
Until my time is up, though, oh Lord, give me the strength and the spirit to endure every misfortune which fortune has provided my life abundantly.

125.

You may find me the most devoted to You, oh Lord.
In times as now, when I cry aloud and only wish to be relieved from life,
I think of You, and my strength is restored completely. I no longer feel beneath the wheel of fortune,
But rather am, in such a spirit, totally given up to You, oh Lord, and made glad with joy at the thought.

As I venture out into the unknown darkness of life,
I seem to be assailed by all things not born from within my own heart;
Oh Lord, how all these things seek to turn me against You, seek to turn my love into hate, my life into misery, my soul into scraps of garbage—to be disposed of at that!
Oh Lord, the devil is around me forever and ever; give me understanding, so that I may refute all the arguments the accuser brings against me.
Let not the opposition win, oh God. Let not my instincts overtake me fully, but give them over to right reason and sound judgment.
Only within reason do I wish to be, not some cosmic skeptic in which rationality alone rules.

I only seek that which is good for me, oh Lord, for in my own self do I know the things which make me dear to You.

Am I selfish as a result? So be it, Lord. You have made the contradictions what they are, and I have racked my mind trying to overcome them through false enlightenment;
I now know only in You do I find true enlightenment.
Let that be the only truth that reigns on this Earth, oh God.

126.

Holy is the wind, and great are all things beneath the sky.
I can never remain hateful towards life so long as I know all things under heaven are watched by God.

By faith, in faith, and through faith—that is how I choose to live my life as a whole.
No burden is so great, no weight so heavy for my soul, as not to be overcome with love and faith in the Lord.
In the Lord do I find my hope secure, my life endured, my salvation strong, and my future certain.
To dust do all things go, and come they do in this world by accident.

As time passes, it shall have its fill; it shall get its payment, and all that was once high shall be made low by the inequity of all things.
So be it. I shall make my voice resound across the whole town—nay, the Earth—and all shall know that I once spoke upon this rock, in hope secure: my life was my own, and through all its miseries did I suffer, endure, and overcome.
That shall be what I shall say in the end.

When I see Peter at the gates, I shall tell him all the things which the Lord has put me through, and in that shall I be rewarded:
I endured more than a man should, suffered greater than a gentle heart should, found in resolve towards the good the only hope, and believed in God all the way through.

May my words sound like music itself.
Never shall I find the desire to speak what is false, and never shall my own pride eclipse the love of the Lord.

Oh God, You who make all things I do small—one with You do I want to be, and one with You shall I be in the end.
My life is a variation upon a beautiful theme, the recapitulation of which is the most sublime in history.
Lord, You are the one I call to when all is empty within myself.
In the end, let me rest secure in You—to the end.

127.

Happy in the moment, in the simple things, shall I be.
My soul shall not be moved by the commotions of the Earth.
I have myself to look after and a world to care for, and my Father’s Word I follow.

Never shall I be led astray by a false light, so long as I have You, oh God.
Never leave my side; always preserve my soul; endure my sufferings alongside me, in order that I may continue to do Your work with joy.
Let not Your holiness turn to wrath against me—
For Your anger is like a burning fire which consumes all things it touches, and which no water can put out.
Oh, holy Father, may we who live on Earth walk among the righteous and holy, for they are the ones who shall be saved by You in the end.
May You judge us rightly, and may we find in Your commands the right path by which to follow.

Never shall I enter into wickedness, and never will I put myself at risk to do evil in Your name, oh Lord.
Holy Father who art in heaven, give me courage along with judgment;
Make me dear to myself by strengthening the person I already am.
May my cries and pleas not go unheeded by You, oh holy Father.
Pout and cry as I do, let not these lamentations be but air—

Hear the honesty within them, the voice of one struggling with their faith; take pity upon thy servant, oh Lord, and save them from themselves;
Allow all their doubt to become like darkness in the light, banished forever to oblivion so long as it shines on.
Fortify me through all this misery, and I will be the most humble and hardest-working servant that’s ever lived, oh Lord.
Blessed is Your name.
AMEN!

128.

Firm in faith shall I remain to the Lord.
I shall not break like a wafer in the presence of danger.
Lord God, embolden me, give me strength, give me courage, allow me to enter life without feeling the dread of uncertainty.

May I live in Your light forever, dearest Father.
Holy is Your name, and great are Your deeds.
Never leave my side, always support my works, hold me fast to You, oh Lord, and may I never taste of hate, or forget that which at present upholds me.

In Your sight do I feel myself alive, endeared towards life, always able to do my works with consistency and conviction.
Nothing becomes meaningless so long as it has its reason behind it.
Lord God, You are that great reason—the greatest reason there is—which man turns to in times of hardship and confusion.

Always must we live in the fear of You, but so too with the assurance that we are saved in You, oh holy God, being so high and exalted above the clouds, brighter than the stars, and larger than life itself.

Indeed, dear God, You are above our mortal life, for You taste not death, know not defeat, see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
In short, oh Lord, You are the highest there is, the most powerful, the most merciful.
Praise be Your name and all Your deeds, holy God, our Father, who art in heaven: Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
AMEN!

129.

As in life so in death: we shall know happiness now, and eternally so after our soul has been made one with You, oh God.

I walk this life alone, a stranger in a foreign land, where all around me are bad, and speak a tongue which I understand not.
To all I meet, I am strange. I am a stranger everywhere. Not even the downcast and miserable are as wretched as I.
My soul knows no contentment, and whatever sweet repose I find in life is quickly occupied by some wretched worry that throws all my happy thoughts into a pit from which I must always scratch, but never crawl out.

Ah, woe is me, my life, and all I have come to appreciate.
I must go, leave and never return from this life.
Lord, let it come—whenever is fine, but let it come:
It must come! It will come! Oh, blessed is the Lord, who brings life into this world and takes it away just as quickly as it came in.
The struggles of living are worse than birth itself. Such is why the death of things in this life don’t bother me—only the way everything else has gone is all that appears to me.
In one moment we are high, in the next we are low, and the Lord decides when our fortunes shall change, and we shall turn from happy to sad, from bad to worse, from good to great, from contentment to satisfaction.

Tired, I am, of life, but I like the thought of my fortunes changing from what they are now; in that thought is strength enough to endure all the whips and slashes which life unleashes on us.
All things become pitiful when brushing up against God. That is how it should be, how it is.
Blessed is His name for making it all like that.
Blessed are all things made by God.
Blessed, blessed, blessed.

130.

Inspiration is such a tragic fit;
It never comes as we please,
But rather always bit by bit,
And in unconscious time do we leave
Our minds when the moment is right to write.
Forever shall we writers feel on strike,
For our own mind is such a passionate mover
Whilst our hands are sluggish and lazy doers.

Alas, the word shall always be of great contempt;
Man knows not when to consent
To his own soul.
Art lives by the written sense,
And hearts rejoice by the sentiment meant.
Toil we must upon these weary pages, spilling ink to no end,
Never finding the right order to place the composition in;
But to return sense, it is never true so long as it remains far apart
From what the author had within their heart
When it came time to write down
What was considered to be sound.

131.

There’s never enough time to write what’s on your mind.
Whatever strikes the heart comes like some fabulous art
Which we are unacquainted with—all its magic and strange signs
That give us no understanding, less still a place to start.

I have always considered things as they come
And hoped that in the end, when it was done,
I would find myself with a work to smile at;
Knowing that I have used my mind quite well and sat
Down to write what the world had offered me,
Which I had no say in, and which my eyes would not see
Had I left it all to blind chance alone.

Dashed my hopes would have been had I tried
To actively call upon that creativity
I so often stress and sigh
Over, should it never come to me.

132.

No topic ever seems worthy in comparison with God.
One can never say enough about life and all its complexity.
Only God knows all, and in Him do we find any hope of everlasting life.
The world, when really considered in all honesty, is quite a harrowing thing.
How there are those who go through the whole of it, oblivious to all its evilness, I will never understand.

I know few things in this world, and for those that I do, I have God to thank.
There aren’t enough words in the world—yea, in every language that has ever been—to convey the grandeur and magnitude of God and His creation.
Whatever praise we do come upon as we live is quickly forgotten, and its sense never seems to impart the spirit that inspired it.

Can anyone today claim to be truly inspired by the Spirit of God?
What man has the courage to truly face God as Moses did?
Can we, after seeing God, have our face shine as well?
Will we suddenly speak without stutter, or will we require our own Aaron in order to transcribe for us what our heart and soul provided?

One can never write enough.
Whatever the quality may be—and I mean that in the vulgar aesthetic sense here—is completely irrelevant.
One must speak what God commands when He commands it, and whatever comes out afterwards should be left to time alone to judge.
We should only seek to beautify the sense of God’s word after we have taken it into our heart.
Our interpretation must become our own truth;
And in that revelation must we communicate what comes—
Let its conception be pure and holy; all else is merely the consideration of man.
What changes a man? Let that be the only real concern, not how pleasing it is to the ear, or how erudite it is.
God already knows all; what we say to Him will always be understood.
Worry not, and write anyway. The more you do, the more praise you bring to God and yourself.

133.

The day heats up and my soul arises.
Upon the approach of sunlight do my spirits brighten,
And as its ascent is ever increasing, I grow dearer to the Earth.
God, all that is holy, continue to bless this day;
Oh, so beautiful do I find it that I hope it never ends.
So long as I live, I wish each day to be just like this one now.
I can never sing praises loud enough to convey all this love.
How can one such as myself ever forget the grandeur that I see before me?
This is all too much to comprehend in a single instance,
Which is why I feel it must be continually thought over and reflected upon—forever and ever, in fact;
For, in truth, man has but a limited time, and all he thinks is so separate from the moment at hand that he rather lives to forget life than live to recall it in moments of silence.

Our sense of simplicity in the world has been lost.
Modernity is but a perpetual motion machine that hurries onwards until exhaustion or collapse.
The power is vested in the worst people, and very few appreciate the actual power they wield.

We are stuck in samsara. Will we ever escape? I believe some can, and already have, but most will not—for the simple fact that they do not possess a mind capable of altering their present values, nor have they the inclination to change their present cycle of emptiness, frustration, and anxiety.

Woe to them! Woe to all people who do not see themselves for what they are, but only what the world considers them as. They shall be lost forever, and shall never know the contents of their heart well enough to overcome the contradictions that constantly swirl about in it.

134.

Forget us not, oh Lord. In all our deeds—whether good or bad—may we be close to You always.

Forgive us our iniquity;
Forgive us our sin;
Forgive us our wrongs;
Forgive us our wickedness;
Forgive us our vanity;
Forgive us our clumsiness;
Forgive us our selfishness;
Forgive us our meanness; and
Forgive us who wrong those who did no injury to us,
And vice versa, so long as we live.

Man is but a bundle of wrongs done by bad interpretations of vain impressions.
Never do we see the true light, but only the shadow.
Always are we trying to see past mere phantoms.
Eternally do we strive to see beyond vain specters.
Forever, it seems, shall we be faced with a ghost
When we attempt to view the world in all its complexity.
This absolute nightmare which is our life—
And which deserves to be snuffed out like a flame in the dark—
Shall pass away silently in that good night,
So long as our faith is secure in You, oh mighty One.
Dear Lord God, never abandon us to our ways, for we are always wrong when we stray from Your path.

135.

Holy Father, to thee I give praise.
So much has my patience been tried.
For so long have I been a stranger in the land of the godless.
Never have I felt my soul more anguish than now.

Of all the things in this life which one is to experience, dejection by the world must be the cruelest of all fates to befall an already down man.
My powers are strained, my limbs are weak, my hope feeble, and my resolve to perform what I ought nowhere to be found within me.
I suffer not on behalf of life, but because of life.

Oh Lord, grant me the strength necessary to endure all these misgivings.

How unfortunate has my fate been thus far, how miserable my conditions, how ignorant and barbarous my surroundings, how confused my understanding, and how misguided my passions.

Holy Father, dearest and most exalted being—knower of all things—hear my cries once again, as I have called out to You before, and heed my needs, in order that I remain strong for You, oh Lord.

Blessed be the Father of all creation. God, most heavenly being, let not my laments fall upon the dumb, or the wicked, or those who know not God.
Give me strength enough to endure—that is all I ask.
Only the ability to overcome what I suffer from—this malaise I feel towards life.

If I shall be granted that—simply the courage to venture out into the world in order to find something to act upon for the sake of my life—I would be the happiest servant that ever walked the Earth.

Oh Lord, I know it is not out of Your powers to grant such a humble request from one who maintains faith in You under the conditions I find myself in now.

Let not these tears of mine fall to the ground in vain, holy Father.

136.

Great is He that watches everything.
Glorious be His name, for He knows all things,
And in Him do we obtain what we seek most whilst we live.
Through life we find nothing but hardship and heartache.
Through Him, however, we find the source of all our happiness and love.
He is the rock upon which we place our feet with firm conviction that it will not fall from under us.
In Him are we given over to the good, never to be steered towards the bad, and never once approaching evil.
Forever, and only in Him, are we to reach everlasting life and bliss.
Holy is His name who made us, preserves us, and watches over us.
The times beckon His return, and when the moment comes, all will be judged by Him rightfully, with justice; and those who have gone against Him shall receive their just deserts.
We who have strong faith in Him have nothing to fear, for it is He to whom we owe our lives, and He to whom we give praise every day we awake from sleep—that cousin of death!
His name is the Lord,
Our Father,
God in heaven,
Holy be His name,
Praise be upon Him.

137.

Sing, sing, oh harp and polished mind.
The time has come and now we must praise the Lord.
Holy be His name, His deed, His life, and His works.
Oh heavenly host, Father most high, are we not Your best creation?
Do You not love to see us labor and praise on Your behalf?
Have we no shame in our iniquity? None, for we know You will provide and forgive.
Blessed are we who know who You are, oh Lord.

Dearest God and blessed Father, hold us fast to Your will, make us Your followers, and have us submit to You in great haste.
Subdue the wickedness that is within us, the weakness which our hearts bring to us, and the confusion which our minds render unto us.
Oh, how those without faith are lost; without Your light, dear God, how do they find their way through this chaos of existence?

Reality was meant for man to dwell in, but not to comprehend in the manner You do, oh Lord.
Let all our innovations be like dirty rags to You, oh Lord, for what is man’s knowledge and craft but the workings of a simpleton in comparison to You?
Give us the wisdom to see how vain our own meddlings in the world are, dear God.
In Your wisdom are we secured a place in heaven—for Your highest wisdom is the simplest to comprehend but the hardest to perform: faith!
That is what a man must have—faith!—and yet, how few manage it; they always let the affairs of the world get the best of them, turn them against You, oh Lord, and in the end, make them totally forget You.
Oh, woe be upon those miserable creatures.
Blessed are You, oh God.
In You—faith in You—shall we strive to maintain forever and ever.
Amen!

138.

Awe! In awe must I be with my life and the ways of God.
Oh You who know all and who confuse nothing,
Show me all my iniquity, in order that I may stand in shame before You;
Show me all the wrong I have committed, in order that I may judge from that point on what to do and what not to.
I know what I have encountered in life, what wrong I have done, what misery I have spun, and what hopes of mine have been blasted from the Earth.

Ah! So much joy did I enjoy as a child. So much suffering did I deplore as a teen. So much striving and overcoming do I perform at present.
Lord, hear Your servant loudly and with unstopped ears:
I wish to be one in You:
In Your love,
In Your faith,
In Your heart,
In Your mind,
In Your soul, and even
In Your very life, oh Lord.

Never do I wish to go astray, never do I seek another one but You, oh Lord.
Holy and blessed is the Father who resides in heaven and judges all things that occur in His kingdom.

May the day come when, after so much toil and struggle, we may look upon Your face as Moses did unto You, and not be put to flight by Your rage, but filled with bliss and thankfulness at Your love.

Oh holy Father who rules all:
May we forever find our strength in You,
May we never falter in our love for You,
May we never lose sight of Your light,
May we never forget the glory of Your works,
May we never banish from our hearts Your commandments.

Alas, oh Lord, never forget us, as we forget You when the world trespasses against us.
Let not the wheel of time crush us down into the dirt, in order that we may forget Your name,
But rather always maintain us through Your Spirit—the source of our faith—and make us near to You as You are to the needy.

139.

It is hard to live a life without praise of the Lord.
In Him do we endure, and in Him are we saved.
We are but the servants of a great Master when we put our faith in Him.
Holy Father who art in heaven, look down upon us so that You may pity us and show us the right way through Your chastisement and love.
Your ways are mysterious, oh Lord, but in Your love—whether it be tough or easy—it always comes to us the same, and with equal admiration all around.

What are we but poor students to the Master, who strive not to outdo Him in His works.
Though in Your case that is impossible with respect to us, oh Lord, it is still a worthy endeavor to keep within our hearts at all times:
That we may do the works of the Lord, and that we may preserve our souls by belief and faith in You—that is the highest calling to which a man can dedicate himself.

Holy is the Father most high in the sky, He who resides above the heavens themselves, and who, if He so wished, could throw down the whole of heaven into the pits of hell—
To You do we look in times of great need and sacrifice.
Dearest God most high in all of creation, let not the things we say to You pass through one ear and out the other;
Let our words have an effect on You in the same way Your commandments have an effect on us, oh Lord.
May our cries always be dried by Your forgiveness, and may Your holiness shine on us so bright that we are perpetually put in fright at the thought of doing ill against You, most holy Father.
Blessed is He!
Amen!

140.

Oh, what a heavy burden the passing of time is to me,
For I get no relief in any of this which I see around me,
And no book offers me comfort, nor do my distractions give me peace of mind.
All in this life fails to sustain my attention, and if it does, it drags me down to despair with it.

Around me do I see the godless enjoying their soon-to-be emptiness, taking heart and obtaining boldness in the face of their ignorance, whilst their fears are buried in distraction, sin, and iniquity.
Forever must the grave seem a consolation to those who find not God among the hearts of the inhabitants of Earth.
Oh, woe is me, dear God. Am I not a stranger in every land I travel through? And more still, am I not the greatest stranger of all to myself?
My own heart is weary of all the heavy affliction it has taken on, and grows timid at the actual thought of overcoming that heavy affliction through force, boldness, and action.

I am an eternal wanderer, weary of the world’s backwardness, and find not a single soul to offer me help and guidance through it all.
Only in You, dear Lord, do I find my safety guaranteed, my faith growing bold and firm, and my desire to live without fear slowly becoming a reality.
Oh Lord, highest Father in all creation, allow this servant and sinner of Yours to perform what I most desire in order to do Your deeds in this world without fear or worry.

All I ask is to have the wisdom to endure what is to come with indifference, or even profit should I see fit to make it so, and from there live as a man uncaring to the hateful towards You—those who do ill in Your name—and compassionate and helpful to the faithful towards You—those who do good in Your name.

141.

The shorter the psalm, the longer the faith. At least to me.
I am emboldened to take up my pen when I read a psalm of some seven verses,
For in those short jubilations do I find the soul of the Holy Spirit so palpable that I can almost taste the inspiration rising from the page;
Its sense is so intoxicating to my mind that I rise to heaven with it,
And like some airy phantom do I move past the clouds and enter into the territory of God Almighty Himself.

Who couldn’t offer God some few verses in praise of Him?
I surely want only to do the work of the Lord whilst I live.
I don’t even care if what I say be completely trivial or simple:
For God, there is no simplicity or intricacy; there is only what the inspired servant had in their heart at the moment of writing;
For God, all is already known, and so, nothing man does could possibly perplex His omniscient mind.

The longer I spill my heart for God, the more firm I feel in my faith towards Him.
What weakens men in action, when done in the name of God, always seems to empower them.
We are always in the wrong with respect to God, but in Him do we find the path towards the good.
His light is more powerful than we can comprehend, and its true brightness too bright for any mortal eye to glimpse without going blind.
God only allows those to see Him who are most faithful and trusting to Him;
And so, always approach God with faith, and you shall find in Him only love and forgiveness.

142.

Holy is the power of God, and great is man for comprehending His works.
This life, were it only composed of men and beasts, would be intolerable most of the time.
I cannot help but think how tragic it all is when man loses his faith and seeks understanding only from within his own mind.
What mind is capable of containing the whole world within it?
There is no man alive—nay, no man there has ever been—who has fathomed the mysteries of the skies, the boundlessness of the heavens, the magnitudes of the stars, etc., with the same authority and assurance as God Himself.

All which we seek at present, and even all which we will seek in the future, is already known to Him;
In Him must we seek our faith, to Him must we chain ourselves, in Him must we walk in calmness through His holy groves and blessed isles.
Gentle and merciful is the Father who made us and everything around us.
Holy is the Lord, great is His word, powerful are His actions, and good are His commands.

We shall want for nothing in life so long as we have our faith in what is noble—what is in God, and what it is He seeks within us, and walks us into.
All our fortunes, and even all our burdens, are the works of His hands—and in that, I can rest easy knowing that no matter what I encounter, the Lord is with me, and in that, nothing shall discourage me from that point forward.

143.

We shall praise the Lord, do His works, and hope for eternal life in the end.
May we always have the faith necessary to do His labors on Earth, as He does them for us in Heaven.
Let us serenade the Lord with our harps and happy psalms of praise and mirth;
Telling of stories past, old glories that still resonate, that inspire the soul, and kindle within our hearts a spark of love for God not normally seen or felt by us.

In the psalms do I find the truth of God’s word spoken to me, traveling down the centuries, resonating with my soul, revealing to me what is necessary in this world, and what shall come to pass for myself and those I love.

Oh Lord, holy Father, to You do I give praise, and in You do I maintain my faith.
I shall never leave this Earth so far as there is work for me to do here.

May I never taste death—when my sinful body is cast aside, and I am brought into the Spirit naked and pure, let me see the face of God, and I shall bow before Him and praise Him to whatever extent I can.

No shouts shall be loud enough to deter me,
No hurtful or lying words shall disturb me,
No misfortune great enough to shake my faith,
No doubt too contradictory to overcome with faith.

Yes! In faith do I find my true salvation, my rock, the place where I may rest my feet with more security than anywhere else in the world.
That is where I want to be, and that is where I will be, so long as I end my life fearing God, loving my friends, forgiving my enemies, and hating no one.

144.

In darkness do I find light, so long as my faith is held firm in the Lord.
There is no task too great for him who praises the Lord, and who finds in His love all that is necessary for life.
Man will never be able to praise God enough.
The psalms themselves could have been written a thousand times over, and still would not have found words enough to accurately display our love towards the Lord.

Can man truly say what’s on his heart?
I suspect only a few are truly able to get at the true sense of their own meaning.
The understanding is faulty, and man is heretical with respect to his own conscience in the end.
Only in God can we find true everlasting happiness.

What is the sense of the word?
Only that which God was good enough to convey to His prophets and sages.
What we interpret is whatever God reveals to us in the moment of seeking His sense.
We mortal men must always stray behind the Lord in this regard, for never can His word be understood as He intended—only as we sinful men interpret it.
Let us go gently, and approach the Lord with much fear and trembling, in order that our haughtiness—our zeal to know Him—will not displease Him.
Spare us from that at least, oh God.

145.

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!
Bless the heavenly host.
May His reign be merciful forever.
Holy is the Father.
Blessed are His works.
Powerful is God.
Almighty is He.
King of kings.
Lord of lords.
Father of our fathers.
Creator of the heavens and the Earth.

When the Spirit moved over the face of the deep, God was there.
When the Spirit moved through my soul, God was there.
When I took my first breath of life, God was there.

Never can my words do justice to what I feel in my heart.
God knows all, and yet to know all must be so small for Him.
Having made all things, God is the master builder, the designer of the greatest blueprint ever devised.
No mortal mind even remotely approaches His.
God is not meant to be relatable: He is meant to be admired, to be praised, to be worshiped, to be followed, and not to be trifled with.
The anger of God causes the whole Earth to shake, the deep to part, the mountains to skip, and the sun itself to stop.
What isn’t there that God cannot do?

I find no logical fallacy devised by man great enough to overcome what God is.
There are no limits to God, and so comprehending His miracles, let alone what He is in Himself—the great “I AM that I AM!”—is out of the question for man.

Let God be the truth and every man a liar.
Let God be my rock,
And let every distraction from my faith in Him be cast into oblivion.
Holy is the Lord, mysterious are His ways, and strong is my faith in everything He performs.
God bless the Lord!

Let the Lord bless Himself, and let His own compliments be of good cheer to Him, for His words are truth, and sweet to the ear, and cause all life around Him to increase, thanks to His holiness and benevolence.

146.

High is my praise of God, low is my expectation of life.
A wise man said in his heart, “There is no God but God”;
And a wise man also said there is no hope for life but in God.
Yea, in our faith in Him, we shall have eternal and lasting happiness.
Our pleasures shall increase, and what we suffer now will be reversed and multiplied ten times over in heaven.

Great is God, and holy is His name.
None does good in this world but He, and in Him do we find what we most sought out of life: happiness and contentment in having endured all our misery.
Never shall I find myself away from God except in moments when the world tries me, tempts me to sin, yearns for me to hate, to get mad, to be spiteful, angry, regretful, and insufferable.

Satan wants nothing more than to see me hate God.
This world is the Synagogue of Satan;
This world is but a momentary damnation,
And only after we have lost the ghost and cast aside this wretched body shall we know the truth in the end.

The truth is a precious thing in the hands of the faithful,
And a great danger in those who seek to do wrong in God’s name.
Not on us, oh Lord, not on us.
Spare us from the ways of the devil, and in You shall we be rewarded.
Praise the Lord.
In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.

147.

Long are the days and far are we from what is good.
Dearest holy God, save me from all that I seem to confront in life presently.
I know no peace, and constant and sharp are my annoyances.
The slight pangs of life always whip me more sharply than the tragedies which may fall upon a man.
Perhaps the novelty of reality is such that we feel more deeply those things which are persistent, despite our mind developing habits of dealing with them.
Ah, such a wretched fate this all is for me currently.

Lord, save me from stupidity; put understanding on my tongue, so that I may speak my mind wisely;
Give me wisdom in order that I may overcome such things as misery is made of.
Far are my hopes, far is my love, far is my courage, confused is my lot, lost am I as a man, hopeless I am towards the future, and early would I like to die.
Many could not endure what I do at present, yet why, oh Lord, must I be strong enough to actually deal with them?
Could not these troubles be given to those more deserving?
Why must wickedness be delivered equally upon the good as the bad, oh Lord?
It is always the same with You, God—always in my heart, always held to in faith by me, yet never to be there for me when I am afflicted with my own issues.

Lost is the world, confused are their heads, gone are their morals, backwards are their ambitions, and hateful are their philosophies.
I hate humankind at times, dear Lord, for they make a mockery of Your genius, and stir up strife and division amongst us who cling to You like a child to his mother’s leg when scared.
I will never be an equal to all these miseries, it seems.

Always must I wander my way through,
Alone shall I forever be—
Both in heart and soul, mind and body, spirit and being—
And no joy shall I know whilst I live, I feel.
Alas, this too shall pass; but make its passing, dear God, a little lighter, a little easier, a little more bearable for me.
All else is but smoke, and this experience is no different.
In that I find my comfort,
For when my end is come,
I shall know the real truth,
And shall become one with You.

148.

My life is war unconquerable.
My peace is short.
My pain is constant and sharp.
I do not hope for a better world for anybody.
Alas, oh Lord, let me not remain clinging to such thoughts which at present pass through my mind.
I’ve passed my hateful judgments upon the Earth, life, and the human race long enough.
No longer do I wish to be filled with the hateful iniquity which so often characterizes ressentiment.

Let me no longer be a “last man,” but a true follower of Your path, oh Lord—all this, in order that I may bathe in Your light, free my soul from the shadow of its own darkness, and put to flight all those things which seek to test me, to try me, to anger me, to sadden me, to ridicule me, to discourage me, to disable me, to stupefy me, to dumbfound me, etc.

The way and the truth and the life?
Ah yes, indeed. That is the Lord’s truth, the greatest truth;
For He hath sent His only Son into the world in order that we may be saved in Him—He who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Blessed is the man who sees the picture and believes the truth:
God the Father, Son the Father, Holy Spirit the Father!
In this equation lies the whole truth for mankind.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Blessed is He that made us.

149.

Let not this warmth in my heart fade into a bleak coldness,
A darkness so formidable that all my joy—both past and present—amounts to nothing in the end.
Spare me, oh God, all future miseries I may suffer at the hands of an uncaring and random world.
May I no longer live under so much oppression, so much affliction to my soul.
So far is my love, and so far is my heart from her—far as I am from You, oh Lord.

The things I love in this life are slight, offer me no reward but simple satisfaction in partaking in them, and end with me suffering on account of wanting nothing more than to pursue them.
Oh, woe is me, dearest God! Look at my plight, my situation, so unconquerable by all reason or effort on my part—is not death the only true answer for me?
Well, I suppose, but that is the ultimate end for all, and when it comes, all shall know the glory of You.

Alas though, sadly, alas—I live, I live far from my love, far from God, and have no ambition in this world but to leave it painlessly and with contentment that I had spent my time well.
The principal part of striving, the insatiable desire to acquire more, the lust for increase, the hunger of consumption for its own sake, the spiritual death of all ideals, etc.
God Almighty, is all this not the most disturbing reality to have come upon man?
Lord, holy Father up in heaven, save mankind from itself, lest we shall perish forgetting what we were made for: not for more, but for faith and commitment to You and Your word.

Slay us not with comfort and distraction, with hardship and penury, with misery and injury—
Not unto us, oh Lord, not unto us, but unto Your name do we give glory, in order that we may remember the highness that lies above us, the mercy that He shows us, and the truth which His path reveals to us.

150.

May I enter into the house of the Lord free of all evil and sin.
Though I, like all other men, enter this world in sin,
I hold out the hope that I may one day enter the kingdom of heaven with peace of mind, with faith strongly convincing, with an honest heart, and with nothing but love to show.
Dearest God, may I not leave this world warring within myself—advancing and retreating doubts and wagers unconquerable—but rather in peace and faith, knowing that I am loved by You.

Doubt is the most troubling thing to man.
He turns his reason on itself and seeks to know himself;
In doing so, he views himself above creation, thereby placing himself outside of God’s frame.
Look how monstrous man becomes when his reason is set against His reason.
The foolish are more foolish than the psalmist realizes.
The fool is not the man who says into his heart there is no God, but rather says, “I know there is no God.”

Man is a simmering pot of doubts that boils over every now and then, and such doubt has to be continuously overcome through faith and struggle.
That is why You give us the anguish we suffer from, oh Lord—to test our commitment to You.
See how we must reverse the situation and place it in light of Your interpretation.
Oh, how lowly and vain mankind is when compared with You, dear Lord.

151.

I propose to give a song of degrees.
In these words let my heart resound across the whole world.
I know what I have done in my time, and what I wish I hadn’t.
In my life much has gone wrong with me—much has also gone right.
In God, however, all my fright is gone, and those past deeds appear like nothing to me.

Oh yes! Praise the Lord, for He is dear, He is merciful, and He is most powerful.
Do not do those things that make you question the goodness of man.
Always shall your faith in Him be secure so long as you pursue the good truthfully.
All a man can do with the time he has is to ensure his heart is close to God, and that he moves through the world honestly.

Let not the confusion of everyday life overtake the faith which upholds that very life.
Never be without God in your mind, for He sets all things right, rebuilds all that fate crumbles, and takes the pain of misery away in the thought of His mercy and holiness.
Let the beauty of His creation overwhelm you, and take in the fullness of it all;
In this are we like true followers of the Lord’s word.
Oh God, let us not fall into a pit of vipers, a pool of misery, a life of meaninglessness and drudgery.
Preserve us from this, and strengthen us against this. In that, we shall find our true joy and happiness.

152.

On the whole,
We feel the Oversoul
Which passes over all
And leaves nothing to fall.

In God do we find the truth; the great truth of this life: that man is in sin at all times, but through faith in God and belief in His word do we come to eternal life and love.
Nothing moves the soul more than that which passes over it and quickens its activity.
The powerful one is he who clings to God when even God has abandoned man.
But does God abandon man?
Ay, His ways are unknown, and to question is to doubt. Such is why faith is necessary at all.
Take the leap (of faith) that affords man the comfort of mind that the Lord is with you, and in that shall your racing heart be calmed.

Over the deep sings the truth of the heavenly host. The crashes of the waves are silenced when He lifts up His hands and commands, “Stop, oh waves, lest I part you like I did the Red Sea!”
The waves listen, and they do stop, lest they be cut deeply through.
God, the most high and most powerful of all, knows where we are, what we do, and what we fail to do;
In Him do we seek to be one, but in His commandments do we fail to follow truthfully.
Oh, curse our fate. Oh, bless our fate. Though we are doomed to live, God makes our life worth it, in the end—for His judgment shall determine what our deeds will merit in the end.
Amen!

153.

Never shall I be confused in the world so long as God is with me.
Never shall I want for anything in the world so long as God is with me.
Never shall I feel envy towards others so long as God is with me.
Never shall I grow ambitious and insipid so long as God is with me.
Never shall I desire more than is necessary so long as God is with me.
Never shall I fear the uncertainty of the world so long as God is with me.
Never shall I taste true death so long as God is with me.
Never shall I forget myself so long as God is with me.
Never shall I stray onto the wrong path so long as God is with me.
Never shall I hate all the suffering I encounter so long as God is with me.
In short, so long as God is with me, I may overcome all things of this Earth!

I know not the color of fear when the flame of the Lord’s fire is kindled within me;
I feel the passion of Christ in my spirit, and in His pain, and through His body and blood, and finally, in His sacrifice, am I redeemed.
Blessed is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Holy! Holy! Holy!
Thrice holy.
Amen!

154.

I am put to laughter at the sight of this world.
The whole of reality is a play by which I, as a mere spectator of it, laugh at how seriously people take the trivial, and ignore the most consequential.
I know nothing besides laughter that could cure me of the sickness of the world.

When bad men are praised as doing good, and fools are the heads of state, and people who work hard get nowhere, while those who lie and gamble to no purpose are rewarded—I’d say we have things pretty bad.

This world is only going one way, and that is towards death.
This is why faith is so necessary. How would man cope with all this barbarity, confusion, needless misery, and endless strife if he wasn’t certain that, in the end, he will be saved through faith?
True faith, of course, for there are many men who say “holy is the Lord” in their mind but never mean it in their heart.
That is why love is the most crucial aspect of faith, for without love, there is no commitment by which we can truthfully engage.

What is man anyway? A soon-to-be grave. A pile of bones, which shall, like the coffin they reside in, be turned to dust for the soil to reap from, for the worms to eat from, and for the dirt to greet.
What is life anyway? A temporary misery. A great drudgery that is laborious in the main and offers no honest laborer a second of repose, true relief.

Endless are the wants of man, and soulless does he become from his passion for more—his zeal and ambition make him a canker to himself, and in pursuing this evilness does he stray from God.

It’s harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle!

Never forget the words of our Savior; so long as we remember that in Him are we saved, we shall have nothing to fear in this world, for all that comes upon us shall melt like ice in a desert.

Life is merely the management of misery, and those who seek to forget it through fun and play, games and sex, books and wisdom, wealth and work, will find all their efforts vain—for in the end, all is disdained by us, and nothing ever truly lasts forever.
Here today, gone tomorrow:
Let that be our reminder to live,
But only in the way of the Lord,
For to live outside of the Lord is to live in this world, and that is folly, for all things in this realm come to dust, and pass away as meaninglessly as do flies in the summer heat.

155.

All our labors be in vain if they are not done with God in the end.
How does man expect to feel any love toward life if he cannot love God?
What endless suffering must be dealt to many men who played the cards right and still lost!
Life is a stacked game in which the house always wins, and our counting cards is of no avail at all.

Oh, what senseless trouble, what misery, what unending suffering is all this for us.
To what end, oh Lord, is all this?
To what end, oh Lord, do we cry and suffer?
To what end, oh Lord, do we weep for Your protection and strength?
Shall not we perish in our attempt to love You truthfully?

Oh! Senseless are all my ramblings, my idle speculations—all but wind, foam upon the sea, the gap between an equal sign:
Total lunacy and absurdity do all things head, and in the end, we shall be dust to the Earth as beaches are to sand.

We shall be made mute by the horrors of the world; our eyes shall be sewn shut by the misery; our hearts shall cease their beat by the presence of evil; and our Lord and Savior shall be seen nowhere:

All this, ’tis true, but through faith—Ah yes! faith!—none will have to be endured at all.
God sets all things right, forgives us our sins, and commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Let that be the whole of the law: follow God, praise God, love God, place faith in God, and all else will follow.

Where shall I rest in God?
It matters not. He is everywhere.
Praise God, holy Father, Lord of lords, King of kings, greatest amongst us, most powerful, the Almighty—
None do better, for there is no better than He.
To Him do we sing, and like Him do we wish to be.

156.

In my spirit has awakened a new zeal for God.
I am, as of now, only passionate about one thing—the Lord!
In Him do I wish to be, and to remain, and to forever praise, and never to get tired of praising.
Oh God, my God, my salvation and hope in life—in You do I find the only peace possible.

Living in a world amidst so much hustle and bustle, all for vain ends, all for selfish ends, all for ends which remove the spirit far from You—
This is all senseless and meaningless. It all comes to naught when time is taken in a far enough perspective.

Forever do the clouds drift beautifully, and the trees blow in the wind, and the grass remains green.
However, I am like a season. I change and wax in my faith, in my hopes, in my dreams, in my circumstances.
I am high one day, and low the next.
I am happy in a second, and brought to tears in the next.
I am always battling against myself in all the struggles I encounter.
Oh, dear Lord, take pity on a miserable servant.
How miserable my life appears to me at present.
So far from my love, far from where I want to be, far from a person I can be happy with, far from any ambition, in fact.

I have never wanted anything; to be nothing was my dream, oh Lord.

I have sought far and wide to understand my plight, and found, for all my wisdom and skeptical thinking, I was made the worse by wisdom:

I increased my culture, read much, studied hard, became familiar with all the things of this Earth—like Faust almost—and yet still felt empty in my heart, as if all my attainments in the end meant nothing!

I said to myself, “Oh my God, I have become like a second Solomon. I am condemned to live wiser than all around me, and yet this shall give me no joy whatsoever. I shall suffer from my own success at being myself. Far do I surpass everybody, for my pride is small, my means humble, my faith secure, and my heart endeared toward only the good.”

Alas, dear Lord, I cried aloud knowing I had attained what I most desired in life, and yet still found nothing in it. Vanity of vanities! Dust to dust! Wisdom as wise as the wind which passes from a person’s backside—that was all I got from my intellectual labors, so much of my life spent in books and reading wisdom, thinking that would somehow make me wise as well.

No, Lord, it only served to make me insipid in the end.

I am now a wanderer, as lost as I was before, only more self-aware of how lost I truly am—for wisdom does nothing but give a man insight into how to judge things according to his heart: that is the end of all knowledge; and in that realization, oh Lord, did I come back to You, sorrowfully and teary-eyed.

Thank God! Praise God! I have found God again!
No more shall I fear the uncertainty of the world, for through faith in Him does all flow over me with indifference.
All that doesn’t concern God is dead to me. I want only God, and will remain strong in my faith toward Him, while doing His works, lifting up others as I can, and hoping future generations may learn from my example what not to do with regard to their lives.

157.

Infinite are the days, and limited are man’s capacities to express them.
I’m filled with an indescribable love toward life when I have God in mind.

When I look out on the world and see a tree, or the grass, or the sky, or a child playing, I can do nothing but wish that experience to never end.
Oh, how restored I am by the movements of life, by the being of reality, by the power of nature, by the glorious works of God Almighty.

High does He reside, and eternal is He; powerful is He; loving is He.
Blessed be God, for there is none like Him, and in His creation do we return to ourselves, as it were, and remember the power of His grace and majesty.

I have always found the blue of the sky quite pleasing.

When I feel the wind as I ride my bike, I am recalled back to love—no longer do I hate my fortune, my past, my misery, the misfortunes which have befallen me, and all the sad little things out of my control.

Like the painter, I lose myself in the crafting of my own canvas. I paint reality before me with my experience, and I mix and fix whatever needs it in order to make a masterpiece of my sensations.

When I live amid the wind and stars, I understand the meaning of childhood again.
Never do my words cease,
Never does my wonder stop,
Never does my love halt, and
Never do my feelings constrict.

I feel myself unstoppable within nature:
When I call upon the warbler, they fly to me,
And all the bees buzz around me with great ease,
I am at home in repose amid the moss and stones,
No ghastly vision comes before my eyes, and I repine nothing!
That is all the work of God’s doing.
Amen!

158.

I have never understood life as a phenomenon, but rather always as a thing born from God.
I have obtained various ways of viewing the world, and my life is best lived when I think of it all with God in mind.
In God do I find my world, my life, my salvation, my future life, and my eternal joy and bliss.

Nothing is foreign to me, and all accept me into their circles equally, for I am with God, and my spirit shines forth through my demeanor.
I am formal, cordial, kind, caring, and strive to live as an unselfish Christian gentleman.
I am a man of reticence, reserved and wanting only to take walks and ponder the glory of God whilst I live, in order that I may do His works more faithfully.

All I have, I have God to thank for, and all that I lose I have myself to blame for.
We are always in the wrong with respect to God.
We cannot know His ways, and those who say they know God do not know God.
Augustine said that if you know God, that means it is not God.
Aquinas, too, said that certain aspects of God can be known through reason, but that others are forever unknown through reason and can only be acquired in faith.

In faith are all things known. In reason are only certain things revealed.
Reason has its own kind of knowing. It’s an intuition, or feeling.
Faith has a knowing which no reason can penetrate.
Faith is the reason which reason knows not.
Faith is what undergirds reason.

With faith does man enter the world as if for the first time,
With clear eyes and a beautiful mind.
Faith is the highest kind of knowledge,
For in order to understand anything
I must first believe in something.
In faith do we raise the understanding to such a height
That it resembles the beautiful columns of Greece in antiquity.
Reason is nothing but faith analyzed,
And faith is only reason synthesized.

159.

The shorter the sense, the more impactful.
The easier a text, the more meaningful.

One can acquire a true sense of what they wish when they listen to the heart and follow the soul along the groves of the mind.
But to where?
To a wooded outcrop somewhere far out in a distant land, amid the bushes and trees of some heavenly forest where only deer and elk dwell.

That there is where I choose to reside.
I wander aimlessly among the trees
And see the berries by the bees.
I am delighted by the sky
And turn my head on high
To things which amaze the sense
And appear to the eye very dense.

Oh yes! All the foliage is doing some good.
The shade it provides is vast; it has stood,
Planted it is upon the ground,
Never to saunter all around
Like some pesky flower,
Whose growth is slow
And whose color is dull.

I only wish to be surrounded by beautiful things.
In beauty do I find a place to place my love.
Oh, so much do I love that I could give all of nature a hug,
And in my pleasure sing all around and make its echo ring.

That is the beauty of nature.
That is God’s doing, and His creation is great.
Blessed tree,
Blessed grass,
Blessed flower,
Blessed everything.

160.

My love is deep, and for its roots I have the world to thank.
I cannot find myself in any pleasant state unless love is nearby, and my mind turns around to God in the end.

What would all this beauty be without God’s hand?
In what way would any of this be without His aiding hand?
Glorious is God, high is His kingdom, blessed is His land, great is His creation, and holy is He—the Almighty, the most powerful, the most high, Lord of lords and King of kings.

Blessed is the one who seeks God and sings on his arrival.
The prophet’s tongue, like the poet’s, shall spew forth only honey for the ears;
Like grapes will the sense be refreshing to all who hear it;
Sounds of the psalms’ meanings and
Harps in the hearts ringing
All around
In great abundance
In order for man to remember his place in the chain of being.

Holy is the Earth, like the pretty flower.
I find no difference in shape, weight, stature;
For to me all is glorious under Heaven,
Even the rainstorms and downpour showers.
Yes, in the course of life does the Earth bellows,
And it sounds so loud it shakes even the silly fellow.

What a glorious thing a tree is.
How precious this world is.
Blessed be its Creator.
Holy is its Maker.
Praise God.
Amen!

161.

Life doesn’t know itself except when in the Lord.
All that man strives for comes to naught in the end,
And the longer one searches for meaning in any of it,
The less they find the resolve to continue investigating it.

Life becomes boring the instant it becomes a routine.
Modernity is human existence made regular, weak, boring, backwards, decadent, immoral, ungodly, etc.
I know no man happy today, and those that are have a conception totally at odds with the zeitgeist as it exists.
What occurs to man when he thinks?
“Ah, another day, another opportunity to lose oneself in the mundane affairs of things which have no relation to me.”
That is modernity!

They do not care about you.
They hate you, in fact.
They want you to suffer for as long as possible whilst keeping you alive with the minimum amount necessary.

This world is weary from itself, and the longer man lives within it, the more he will wish for the end of the war that is himself.
Yes! Man is at war with himself every day he lives, for he doesn’t live for himself, but rather as a result of himself.
Man’s pursuits today are strictly corporate, strictly familial, strictly contradictory—both profoundly conservative and liberal at the same time.
What man does is live for others, in order that he may find a reason for his own life—that he may live for himself.
The problem is, one doesn’t find happiness living for himself, and if they do, it’s under very strict and impractical circumstances which cannot be replicated in the lives of others without jeopardizing society as a whole.
This world is organized so top-down that even the chaos implicit within it must be managed, in order that its decline is gradual rather than straight away.

Oh, dear Lord, do you see now why I find modern life so taxing and dreadful? It’s all the same stuff everywhere, and the more people pursue all these vain things, the further they stray from Your path.
Hell must be empty, for all the devils are up here on Earth, causing chaos and sowing the seeds of a coming Armageddon.
So be it! My faith is in You, oh Lord. Let me make myself anew, artistically, so that I may overcome the nightmare that is modern life.

162.

There’s only so much a man can say before he repeats himself.
The act of writing is only as useful as the spirit that moves us to write in the first place.
What we say here can only ever be a representation of our interpretations of reality.
Idealism must always confront materialism in the same way a mystic confronts an atheist.
There’s an eternal conflict within man’s nature that compels him to reject what is true,
Not because he loves the false, but because the false is a great comfort to him.

What man performs when he thinks is merely a process of self-justification, in which his interpretation corresponds with his heart, and nothing more.
The correspondence theory of truth—though an attempt to present an objective criterion for value judgments, which it labels falsely as “objective”—
Still has some utility when we consider truth perspectivally.
The endless cogitations which rouse our minds and bring us closer to true speculative thought may rightly fall into the category of subjective truth;
But this kind of thing is precisely what we need: subjectivity is truth, for truth is dependent on the subject’s own criterion for what may and may not correspond with their heart—nothing more, nothing less.

That is why God is the ultimate truth: in God, we find all desires fulfilled, for God in the abstract sense is merely the whole of humanity’s desires piled up and synthesized into a single holy figure.
Cogito, ergo credo—I think, therefore I believe.
Let that be my faith.
Praise the Lord in the end, always! Remember that.

163.

Repetition is the first component of understanding.
A man who feels certain in things outside of God is a man who doesn’t know what certainty is.
So long as man is unsure of the future, he will always feel uneasy about his situation in life.

The world we live through today is like something out of a horror story. In fact, it is worse. It is the literal collapse of tradition and morals as we knew them.
At this point, we shouldn’t even say we knew them, for I don’t think we ever had a clue what we ourselves meant when we thought of our subjectivity with respect to life.
We were always dragged along by some tradition or foolish cultural idea which we adopted for no other reason than that’s what the zeitgeist demanded.
Man hardly knows himself, and yet by the time he finishes high school—which can hardly be called an education in the real sense of that term—he’s supposed to know the path he is to follow in life until death.
That is intellectual hubris on a scale incomprehensible to me.
Even if one should be a perfect worker bee, and follows the parameters of society to a T, it still cannot be said that the individual is living for themselves, only that they live within a system that they got used to, and even mastered to a certain extent, but never grew out of or wanted to question.

For most, it is enough to find a job and start a family—and that will be the thing they dedicate their life to until their death—but for me, that’s too narrow a perspective on life, and makes the human being nothing more than a surrogate for the success of their progeny and the lineage resulting therefrom.
One sees immediately that those who claim to be following the world rightly are really acting against themselves, for they’ve reduced their life to the point that only the biological imperative is considered—which, funnily enough, is the exact thing most of these so-called progressives are fighting.
Here, as elsewhere, we see the internal contradictions within modernity reveal themselves—but I doubt anyone will actually change the social organization as it currently exists in order to avoid this kind of thing.
Most people today are content with saying, “It is what it is,” and going about their business, living their precarious lives day in and day out—wishing every day for nothing more than mere security.

You see at once how Nietzsche was right in the end—every human being alive today has seemingly adopted the position of the “last man” subconsciously, and as a result, identify themselves with the material conditions that make up their reality, rather than attempting to transcend it through faith in God, or philosophical study, or some sort of Dionysiac force.
Alas, alas—woe be upon the day! A day of great wrath indeed.
Bow before God and maintain faith. That is all we can do.

164.

I’m bewildered by the world.
Existence places a veil over my eyes and expects me to see where to head, blocking my sight.
Those who view life as a series of tasks to be completed for the advancement of some goal are regimented in their thinking, and on account of that, become narrow-minded and lack the capacity to see nuance.
Every issue to them is a false dichotomy, a black-or-white scenario, an either/or to be confronted and overcome.
They comprehend nothing seriously because they do not think seriously. They only follow their instinct, which has been so poorly treated and has become so malnourished, that their instinct is the herd instinct: whatever maintains the status quo is automatically assumed to be correct, and everything outside of that is to be ignored, discouraged, and even falsely accused.
What narrowness, what stupidity, what uninquisitiveness.

Reality is merely a canvas upon which we paint pictures of our perceptions.
That which we see is merely a schema, an intuition, a subjective interpretation—representation and nothing besides.

I hate all things that turn a man against his own instinct.
What is modernity but the slow domestication of man’s natural impulses?
Oh, how wretched the times are. A man cannot even support himself with any dignity; every hoop jumped through must be for some end that is not really wished for by man, but which he must accept if he’s to eat.
There’s the modern rub. There’s the touch of death. There’s the end of the artistic spirit as we know it.
Authenticity has sold itself out, and now all true creators must bow down to the market or starve to death. What a lovely system of misery we have created for ourselves.
At this point, I say it should be the death of us.
Let this collapse be vicious, a Black Death a trillion times over.
Yeah, let it get so bad God Himself will have to come back just to save us from ourselves.
Let that be how God returns.
Amen.

165.

I am no prophet of doom,
But I certainly speak with much gloom,
And hate the world with such a passion presently
That even the thought of God is hurtful to me.
How can I praise God when I do not feel His spirit move over me?
In what way can I honestly say, “I love God,” when my faith in Him has waned in the passing hours?
Nay. Let me never attempt to praise God when I do not feel Him in my heart.
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and let me walk about in my darkness undisturbed.

I do not wish to hear from anybody, or anything for that matter, when I brood over existence with a hateful aspect.
My eyes turn upon everything and ravish it, exposing all its evident wickedness.
I am at my best when I speak honestly, and at present, that is all I could possibly speak.
How often must I go over the same sentiments which I thought I already expressed?
When will I ever overcome the need to say everything on my heart and soul?
Oh, how I hate this all so much at present.
I get no peace from anxiety, and all my heart yearns for nothing short of death.
I would ask God to save me, to preserve me, to keep me strong, and to maintain my faith in Him—but I see very little help that kind of request can offer to a man whose heart is presently shut out of God’s kingdom, and made to wander a nightly path that few mortal eyes can penetrate.

So be it. That is my fate currently. That has always been my fate. I have always been carrying this burden inside me, and no matter how much I pray, or try to exorcise it through writing, reflection, or exercise, I can never seem to overcome it. It always just stands there at the end of all I do, silently, with a terrible, indescribable grin on its face, as if it knows it shall always be within me, even should I succeed. This is the daemon Goethe spoke of. This is the spirit inside me that quickens me to activity, and which helps me to write as fast and as well as I do.

I’m a stranger everywhere. I’m an outcast even among introverts.
I was seemingly born either for suicide or the priesthood—but sadly, I see myself too timid to approach either.
I know my true fate then: either to go mad or to perform Sokushinbutsu; either those two or to become a hermit like Henry David Thoreau.

166.

I will never tire of this burden I carry in me.
Seemingly do I always find reason enough to call it forth,
And as it walks towards me does it darken all things with its black aspect,
And at once am I meant to feel the true pressure of existence.

The unbearable ungraspability of reality is quite poetic when considered from an artistic perspective.
The artist must always sharpen their feelings to the point that even the slightest contact with them will cut you deeply.
All of art is merely an attempt to communicate what thought alone cannot comprehend.
Art is a tradition in which the artist turns sensation into creation.
As it is for God, the desire to produce a work which you afterwards call ‘good’ is the entire point.

Never will I equal this feeling. Never will I find ways of accurately saying what I feel.
The fact that I feel at all is an indication that my intuition is finely attuned with my soul, but it in no way offers me any guidance as to how to feel something other than dread or misery at the thought of confronting it.

Action is such a perilous thing. Every movement reveals its own confusion, and the more we try to bypass the anxiety it causes us by more action—a false display of bravado—the more anxious we become; so much so that we grow numb, and feel ourselves caught within a lie so inescapable the only option is to sit in repose and reflect on our vanity.

I thought I had the world figured out. It turns out I only confused myself even more.

When a man presupposes the world to be one way and has experience disprove him, he is likely to grow pale at the thought of the world—for the world is too vast and complicated for a single man to have enough reason and judgment to come to helpful conclusions on anything.

It is in despair, then, that we find our soul—we thinkers and intellectuals who enter the world bright-eyed and confident that we have obtained enough knowledge from our schooling to actually do something of use; nay, it is all lies—everything is lies, all the way down.

Only, it seems, in a state of deep fear and trembling must we pass through life, and only at our death must we come to know true contentment.

167.

“The way everlasting,” says the Psalmist.
What on this Earth is everlasting, however?
Nothing.
Only in God do we find our true hope and salvation.
This existence is a nightmare were it not for God, who, in the end of our days, wakes us up from such night terrors.

Human life must be some kind of mistake.
I say again, were it not for God, this existence would be futile, for it ends in death and destruction.
Why should we cling to any hope at all, should the evident dissolution of life disprove any stout conviction that there is such a thing as meaning in itself?
Existentially, perhaps, but not eternally, not objectively, not beyond the criterion of mankind.

Man has always been the self-justifying animal.
From barbarism to barbarism—all red in tooth and claw,
Top to bottom do we stall our fate, and in the end curse ourselves,
Troubling deaf heaven with our bootless cries, and weeping as we do—tears falling to the ground enchantingly—
And in the moment of hitting the Earth do we see the futility of our lives;
Even in our stoicism do we struggle against the truth of our mortality.

I don’t believe any man who says he does not fear death.
He merely says he is indifferent towards death—or perhaps even wishes for death, should his situation be meaningless, miserable, and without hope—but that is very different from having no fear.
Fear is the uncertainty that lurks behind every experience which we are yet to pass through in our own lives. Anxiety is fear felt beyond what is reasonable—it is an allergy of the emotional faculty.
I say man cannot do anything else but fear death, for death is fear made tangible in that the experience of it ends consciousness itself—and so, in that sense, it forever eludes our possibility of knowing it truly at all, for the second we experience it we no longer experience it at all: it is the last thing we will experience—were it not for God, of course.

On this, Schopenhauer is perhaps the best:

It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance; they stand like a sentinel at the gate leading out of this world. Perhaps there is no man alive who would not have already put an end to his life, if this end had been of a purely negative character, a sudden stoppage of existence. There is something positive about it; it is the destruction of the body; and a man shrinks from that, because his body is the manifestation of the will to live.
…
Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment—a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to an answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

168.

In the language of the mystics do I propose to speak.
I know not why I sin,
Where I’ve been,
Or in what way I will flow forth from the world hereafter.

Only in God do I seek my true salvation.
In God is life, happiness, and every other thing a human heart could desire—
those things to human life which are sweet and most precious to the sense.
We know not Him, but feel Him in our hearts.
The whole of our being is cast from His source like an ember from a great fire.
The substance of our life is found first in the inner essence of God’s nature.
Though we know not these things, we may speak of them only allegorically, apophatically, and speculatively.

Greatest God most high, hear my understanding, so that You may correct my sense through Your spirit.
May the ghost not be lost on me too soon.
May the spirit of Your life fill me every second.
May I always have You in my heart, and
May I never weary of loving You—
To love You as I love myself, more so even!

169.

Let not this world lead us into temptation, oh Lord.
Forgive us our misgivings, and forgive those who sin against us.
The deeds of my life, known to You already, have struck a chord in Your heart,
And now I suspect myself to be considered cautiously by You, oh Lord.
Forgive me for these wicked deeds of mine.

Yesterday in the night, when my heart was covered by darkness and my soul resembled that of a shadow, I spoke ill of You, oh Lord.
Let now my temporary follies and vanities go unpunished; let not these things be punished severely, oh Lord.
I ask for gentle treatment, and only what is requisite in accordance with Your will.

When the time of judgment falls upon our heads, there shall be none who challenge Your authority.
Let Your will be done, and in our hearts will we accept what is given unto us by Your gracious hand.
Spare the faithful, punish the wicked, and help the weak and needy.
I only wish to do Your will whilst I live on Earth, dearest Father.
May my failings and angers last but an hour, whilst my love and faith in You endure long throughout the day.

170.

Amidst the backdrop of the blue sky, I see the green trees swaying in the wind.
Their large branches move slowly, whilst the leaves flutter about helplessly, clinging to their little stems like a child its mother.
Always must the world of nature enchant us.
When we look at the natural, we are returned to ourselves—a sense of what we were as kids returns, and the mundane is suddenly filled with magic.

Simplicity affects us in ways unseen, but the heart knows, and beats with the pulse of life vibrant and light.
Creativity, with majestic spirit, flows through the veins, and swells our brains with thoughts unseen, ideas undone, but in their incompleteness appearing beautiful.

Every beautiful act is done with good intention, but often does it arise accidentally, incompletely almost, as if the chance of the world were subject to its own kind of chance.
Ah yes, life—that is a chance accident, as the tree which moves in the wind when it does, and passes our eyes when it does, and enters our spirits when it does, and everything else, when it does.

171.

What dwells within me is a spirit unknown,
A substance unseen,
A force within me
Which I cannot comprehend.
My ideas follow suit,
And I am forced to go about my thoughts with suspicion.

Always must I cast doubt on all I think;
My powers never feel suitable to the task I give myself,
And confidence has never worn its colors on me beautifully.
Life is a strange thing for me, and I am a stranger to myself.

The world in all its blackness encompasses me,
For which I must now suffer the dreads of confusion consciously.
Oh, what misery self-awareness is—to know far in advance what is to come of you, but feeling unable to change the state of things through will alone.
Silliness and absurdity does all knowledge devolve into, and wisdom is but the vanity of an open mind.
Values not our own guide what we are, and forever are we judged by them unwillingly.
The pressures of merely being honest.
What strain!
What disregard and uncaring gestures are shown to those who have self-discipline; those unwilling to go along with the herd.

I am a stranger everywhere in this world, and must continue to be so long as I live among those who do not think as I do.
My passion is but a motivating force which negates the dross of tradition and old values.
I must forever be alone so long as I value my own integrity—for to find another as I is too impossible a task, nor would it be maintainable, ever should I.
Alas, dear life—come to an end already, so that I may not suffer by your hands anymore.
Forgive these rantings, Lord.

172.

Forever slowly must I walk amongst the land.
Terrible! Terrible! Terrible is this world to me.
Perhaps I am to myself.
I know not at this point, however, for all things look the same through my eyes presently.
Life is inescapable for those who already live.
It is a long process of slowly dying, of becoming nothing—
the process of decay within ourselves is played out like a play upon the stage of the world.
We are a performance, and our acquaintances, only actors.

Oh, such needless confusion, such needless being at all.
To judge, to decide, to be—perchance not to be?
Ay, there’s the rub. There’s the unquestionable truth which knows not itself but which has an answer ready.
Ready for what? We know not.
Why not?
Because we do not.
Are our words nothing then?
Yes!
Oh words, how foolish you are.

What would I be without this world?
Would I have to be anything were I not?
The world has its own genius, and all philosophers—I hate them—they lie and know not what they speak.
Only action presents itself to us honestly, and how impossible is such a thing for a man who only thinks.
These contradictions shall never be overcome, and man will always become stupid by making himself learned for the sake of providing answers to them.
As if a contradiction could have an answer put to it, rather than an interpretation of what the thing in question is.
Unanswerable questions are all these are.
Send them all to hell, and let us dance among the devils on Earth whilst we live.

173.

Nothing to do.
Nothing to be done.
We are but shapes in the sun,
And soon enough shall we be dust.
Hooray for the coming end, the apocalypse.
Oh craziness, oh weariness, oh delirium—all existence is.
How people handle it without going crazy I shall not know.
I don’t even wish to venture a guess.

Do what you must.
Do what you will.
But leave me out of it.
I want nothing to do, because nothing is what I want to be.
I can’t even find the time of day to bother to rhyme these weary lines.
I hate all things—except God, of course!—and wish to be done with it all already.
These thoughts are too distracting, too impactful upon my psyche to leave me with energy to do anything else.
I would ask, oh Lord, for You to save me—but I think at times I don’t want Your saving.
I feel so unworthy of life that my life is itself a kind of hell—it is punishment enough that I live.
No fire and brimstone could equal the anguish I feel now.

My heart is nowhere to be seen, and I am alone amongst my kin and friends alike.
I see nothing as black and white,
And that is perhaps why I suffer so.
I think too much on things of no consequence,
And in doing so, act upon nothing, experience nothing, and wish only to feel that nothing for all time.
All time?
Yea, forever and ever—AMEN!

174.

My thoughts run foul,
And so too do all my ambitions—
Run straight into the ground—
And disarray the whole of my vision.

The vanity of existence.
That is my declaration of life—that it is folly in itself.
I am tired, yet my thoughts could not be more energetic with hate.
There are so many innumerable things which I have experienced in life,
Which have all come together to give me a particular perspective on existence
Which, on the whole, has made me a passionate despiser of all things under the sun.

But is it true?
Ah, what does it matter!
It’s true in the moment I feel it!
Should that not be enough?

The little things come together,
And when their sum is taken,
I am left with a result I hate
To reason through and recalculate.
I am far from a happy man.
Perhaps the point of life is not to be happy, but content.
Content? Content I am, but I’m made miserable by what I see around me.

My life is not mine own—and neither is it anyone else’s.
I fear no one’s life is theirs—rather, it is subject to the age they live in,
And on that account must it be dealt with.

Woe to the man—like myself—who finds nothing in this world for him to do.
Everything in modernity is so counter to my own nature that to live at all today is literally hurtful.
Most ‘regular’ people (if such a thing even exists) don’t realize how
Much effort it is for some people simply to appear ‘normal’ in the world.
To live at all requires more effort than is worth it in the end.

The fact that mankind continues to bother with life—taking itself so seriously, and maliciously, I might add—is a shock to me.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, for stupidity has always been
In the ascendant, and man has always found it easier to endure what he
Must in order to live, rather than put an end to his living altogether.

Oh, how bold and noble man is—is he not?
I’d say no.
Take your life when you will.
That is the ultimate freedom.
The truest salvation of mankind:
DEATH!

175.

Forever must I continue this daunting repetition.
Forever must I be consigned to my fate of life.
Oh, senseless soliloquies of man.

I am ever spiraling down into the depths of my own mind,
Building a little hut for myself to retreat into as the world approaches.
The citadel of reason which Boethius spoke of is some consolation to me,
But philosophy herself doesn’t seem to make me wise, only more bitter.

I am Faust.
I am a sick man.
I am a bitter man.
I am a ridiculous man.
I am the underground man.
I am the one whose spirit negates all that is good.
I am the one whose pain is constant and sharp, and who doesn’t wish for a better world for anyone.

Constantly must I ruminate upon all the things that cause me misery.
Forever must I try to overcome them by using them to spur me on to action.
Action—but for what end? To what purpose? For whom and to where?
Ah, I shall have no answer should I be asked.
What makes me live and carry on is unknown to me—probably for many, too.
What is known to me is that there is a force within me that drives me forward.
I am pulled from without, and must constantly feel the tug of a string on my heart.
From whence this passion for life comes, I know not.
Perhaps I feel the world so much that I’m made miserable by the fact that I cannot limit myself to only one aspect of it—which most today do.

The world is my suffering, because the world is built on the suffering of others in order to run at all.
We do not encourage people to dream as they will,
And our souls stagnate because of it.

176.

The psalms repeat themselves to the point of being sickening.
I cannot bear to read some of them sometimes.
Praise the Lord for this, that, and the other, but who has been more ignored by the Lord than the poor Jews?
Bless that tortured nation, those confused people (though very inquisitive)—
Contradictory they are:

Canaanites of old, shepherds and pastoral people,
Clung to the dust of their prophet’s ashes.
Writings of old,
Stretched out on scrolls,
Buried in some pottery, or hidden in a cave,
Where an innocent rock comes flying in
And reveals the secrets of ancient texts not seen in centuries.
Oh Israel, oh Zion, God’s chosen (supposedly anyway).

I care not for what people think, but only what they do.
Ideas are stupid things anyway,
Which we always use to obfuscate our true intentions.
No one gets far in thought anyway.
And no one knows this better than the Rabbis,
Those tannaim of old, who spoke their works aloud
And had them written down by scribes and pupils who
Perhaps understood very little, but who wanted to know.
Ah, to know, to be wise—Hakham—that is the duty of a Jew:
Question all things, and know of nothing but God and His word.
Hallelujah!

177.

Praise the Lord, I have done enough, or so I feel.
But that can never be true, for the Lord is infinite and without bounds.
Forever must the mouths of those with sense speak happily unto the Lord.
To Him we owe our day, and to Him we owe our life.
Blessed is He, highest Father who art in heaven,
The watcher of our every deed, and who knows all things.

I am drawn to the love of life by the thought of Him.
None of my past miseries seem like such bad things in the face of Him.
God makes all things right, and no suffering surpasses His greatness.
Such is why faith must be clung to, for without it a man may lose his senses trying to understand his own suffering.

I no longer desire to turn from God.
Oh God, let my mind and mouth be only for Your praise.
Never can I return to my former self: godless, without hope, miserable, wretched, at all times lost.
I was separated from myself, and in my darkness did I seek my own light.
My own light, however, was not enough to overcome my plight.
Thus did I call out to You, oh Lord,
And make what noises I could in Your direction
In order to get Your attention.
Did I succeed?
In the end, Lord, only You know.

At times I feel You are far from me, and at others You are clearly near.
In this, however, I am confused by Your presence, and I worry for my faith.
Is my love in You real? How can I ever know how to approach Your life without faith in myself?
I am uncertain, oh Lord, not only about You but everything else.
I suffer on behalf of my own lack of understanding.
I am made to wander this world alone, I feel, at times.
Far from You, I have no ground upon which to walk.
I am called on far, but must get there another way—without faith in You, oh Lord;
The world makes me turn against You, oh Lord.

God, save me from this world, this place of hellish hate
That promotes sin and wickedness all throughout the state.
My bygones are now all gone, and I now only wish to love You, oh Lord.
Let Your spirit, oh God, breathe over me
In order that I may finally find myself,
In order that I may have the courage to do Your works for others,
In order that I may, in a single word, live.

Give me the courage to take a leap of faith.
Give me the strength to endure what I must for the sake of my life.
Allow me to venture into the belly of the beast without being swallowed whole by it.
If I could just live.
Time and strength do not trouble me,
And neither does my health or conviction—
Rather, what I need is a motive, a drive, a telos behind my actions.
Up until now, my life has been directed by whim, chance, and customs of society.
I need to enter into society, however, in order to live.
Hence my greatest conflict, holy Father.
I know not how to reconcile my private nature with the necessity of a public existence.
How will I find what I must do?
Do You not already know, oh Lord, I wish to do nothing but love You?
The world is counter to my nature.
How will I overcome it?
Only in You, oh Lord!

It seems I will need the help and protection of You constantly as I walk through life.
Help me, oh Lord.
Give me strength.
Give me courage.
Give me wisdom.
Give me confidence.
And above all,
Give me hope, oh Lord:
Hope that my life will not become nothing, but turn into something great and glorious—something from which others can benefit.

That is my greatest passion.
Nothing more, nothing less, oh Lord.
Amen.

178.

In darkness is the man who walks without wisdom for life.
The nature of our experience compels us to seek answers,
But where on Earth today dwells a man capable of giving answers?

The beginning of all wisdom is fear of the Lord.
After that, it may be said that discernment—that is, judgment—is most important.
A man must consider, first, what questions are important enough to be taken into his mind.
The world lays distractions down like a snare for man to walk into.
Should he go about this world blind, he shall fall into traps continuously.

A man must always be vigilant and see for himself the nature of things as they come into this world.
Not through first principles, but from common sense and right reason, must a man approach reality.

The world knows only those things that it values, and these are dark things indeed.

No time in history has ever seen good men praised for their wisdom, and less still were they taken seriously for their counsel.
The way of wisdom has always been foreign to all minds that consider life first and foremost practically;
Before that consideration comes nothing, and after it comes only what a man wishes to see.
Hence why wisdom must always be repeated throughout the ages:
What is considered worldly is made the entirety of people’s lives today, and so they consider all things godlessly and materially—thence comes their stupidity and wickedness.

So long as the old customs are taken as common sense and sacrosanct—left unquestioned and adhered to like a dogma—the practical ones will be right in ignoring them, but will also commit great wrong by relying on their own misguided principles, which are so narrow and specific to their own situation that they help no one but themselves:

In truth, the wisdom of modernity may be described precisely as that—egoistic and selfish, untrusting and unnecessarily competitive.

In every age, there have been those who have wanted to forge their own wisdom.
I respect that endeavor, but I would only advise them to first go through what the sages of old have already discovered before they attempt to offer their own unrefined wisdom about things already said better by others.
Those who seek wisdom in their own way without first consulting history prior to them do nothing but express the vices of their own age.
If wisdom is to be truly wise, it must be true for all ages and must resound in the hearts of a European as much as an Asian.

That is wisdom.
Sing unto it, and it shall come in bouts of inspiration.

179.

Forever is man repeating what he has already said or heard before.

The common trope about wisdom is a very true one:
It all stems from the same place, grows in the same way, and is ignored in like manner by all.

The world shall always find itself consumed by its own shadow so long as people live who know not God and who fear not the words of the Lord.

The shadow of ignorance is greater than the wise figure that produced it.

Always must man walk about with uncertainty in his heart,
And if he be honest with himself, he will say to himself, “I know not what I am, and am a fool for considering life seriously at all.”

Wisdom is but the desire to cling to sense for life.
Wisdom is nothing but life distilled in the form of a maxim, or adage, or proverb, or pithy saying, or laconic statement, or gnomic couplet, or whatever word may be put to it that describes what it is.

For myself, I have searched far and wide for some sense of wisdom, and found that wisdom does nothing for a man who has yet to live.
One may memorize a whole library and still find himself unable to apply all of his so-called wisdom—as if it could even be called wisdom if it is not employed in some useful way.
Hence why Goethe’s old maxim about wisdom being nothing but experience written down—in order to transform it from an intuition to an actionable principle which others can use—is absolutely true.

180.

In every wise saying is an unrecognized truth.
There’s always something within an honest statement that we fear to acknowledge,
Perhaps because we know deep down that the wise saying exposes our own inequity.

Often does wisdom come upon us, but usually only after we have suffered the faults and injuries of different situations we could not best.

Every true saying has something hurtful about it.

We are always striving to bypass our past sufferings, and so every truth is a target against what we try to avoid in our daily thinking;
Hence why so few reflect on their experience at all, and why thinking is hurtful—to say nothing of its difficulty for those who do none of it except when their material means are touched.
Touch a man’s heart and he will hardly notice it. Touch a man’s brain and you will confuse him. Touch his money, however, and you’ll have a genius factotum on your hands, ready to use every aspect of his character to defend his livelihood.
That is what we consider wise today—a person who can “get theirs,” who can “succeed and outcompete,” who can “overcome the obstacles,” etc.
Wisdom today is material, not spiritual, and hence why it’s all vanity and foolishness in the end:
Not only is it selfish and without God, but totally abhorrent to basic human decency or cooperation.
It rewards the worst impulses in man and does all it can to eradicate goodness within the hearts of those who try to steer clear of its destructive path.
It is not for life truly, but only superficially, and that’s why it will be forgotten as soon as the age collapses;
Which will hopefully bring about a better age, an age more caring, understanding, sympathetic, and progressive.

181.

Wisdom slowly warms us to life.
Without it, all things would seem arbitrary and foreboding.
The experience of others teaches us more about life than life itself sometimes.
The more one matures, the more one sees how manifold and uncertain the ways of the world are.

One who wishes to enter life supremely gifted in the ways of the world before actually entering it is dreaming of the impossible—like a fool who wishes to be happy at all times.

There is no royal road to wisdom.
One must suffer at the hands of life before one can discern and judge what is and isn’t for them to pursue.
The greatest benefit of wisdom is that it allows one to know for oneself what one wants out of life.
Life would be one mistake after another were it not for our ability to recall all that we have suffered in living through it.

One gets the feeling that life becomes easier the more one lives it, or the more one is acquainted with how it operates. This is false.
Life is at all times immensely difficult and degrading to our spirits. What people really mean to say is that life becomes more tolerable the more they encounter their misery.
Man acquires ways to overcome his suffering by making his suffering just another component overall. He compartmentalizes the experience in order to view it in an objective manner, and in doing so removes all the emotional baggage that comes with subjective suffering.
It may be useful in certain circumstances, but on the whole it is immensely dehumanizing and, in fact, quite dangerous to the spirit of man; for it seeks to remove the subjectivity of experience and reduces life to a mere utilitarian calculation of pleasure versus pain.
It is not wisdom at all, but rather damage control—a form of reverse psychology in which the thing that makes you miserable is precisely the thing you look forward to, because you’ve managed to convince yourself that in overcoming that misery, that somehow makes you a stronger person, either mentally or emotionally.

True wisdom is avoiding situations like that in the first place.

Again, wisdom is nothing more than judgment—the ability to know at a glance whether something is existentially beneficial for you or not. That’s the only hedonic calculus that one need perform. All else is vanity.

182.

All of wisdom is but experience made manifest in life.
It is a collection of recollections that may or may not apply to the scenarios of your own life.
The fool takes wisdom from past ages, thinking it will necessarily apply in their present age. Not so!
Wisdom should itself be approached cautiously.

The best way to approach wisdom is silently, tiptoeing, as it were, toward the sense of the maxims—comparing the thing written with the experiences of your own life. Should they correspond quite well, you can expect the wise saying to be of some use.

One cannot expect wisdom to solve all their problems. Wisdom is only a way of managing life, not a total solution to it.
There is no solution to the problems of life but death.
Assuming that answer is abhorrent, however—which I assume most people would—we must find alternatives.
Man must seek new interpretations of his situation if he is to move beyond the painfulness of them.

Life is a short game that, once over, returns with little to show for it.
The only positive aspect of it is that one can say they’ve existed at all and left their mark on the world in whatever way they could; this, however, in no way makes it meaningful or purposeful.
One can achieve everything society told them and still find it all empty and meaningless, which is what it ultimately is in the end.

Meaning is itself a narrative, and wisdom (for the young, anyway) is merely the experience accumulated from others as they’ve lived out their own narratives.
Life is a narrative, my friend. Write the best one you can, and rely on wisdom when lost in the thick of the plot.

183.

Man must constantly take counsel with himself if he is to pass through the world without difficulty.

It is hard enough to live without purpose or reason, but to go through life without these things whilst also being ignorant of one’s own heart is doubly bad.

Treacherous are the ways of the world.
Life itself will swallow a man whole should he let it gain ground on him.
Such is life: a never-ending labor of satisfying basic necessities and vain wants.

The world at present is built around structural inequality, and so whoever earns necessarily steals from another, which of course means that other must struggle as they must in order to have the satisfaction of drawing breath.

It’s a tall order to expect someone to do something for which they have no inclination.

That’s precisely why survival is predicated on the ability to provide a resource or service to another, for which they are willing to pay you in accordance with the demand in the market and the supply of labor that fills it.

Wages are but the expression of a man’s labor time, and that represents to him his very life.
This is what modernity has become: a cycle of resource extraction in which man works in order to live, and lives in order to work.
His surplus value is generously taken by his employer, and he is left a meager paycheck worth less than the labor he actually provided.
It’s so sad, too, because it doesn’t have to be this way.
Every day a person works, they are contributing to a system that systematically keeps them down and represses any dream they may have outside of merely working to keep themselves alive.

The happiest people today are either those who get enjoyment out of their work or those who do not need to work in order to survive.

Everyone else is performing, subconsciously no doubt, a marginal utility calculation. People subject their whole life to routine and repetition, leaving no time or energy for anything aside from their miserable job.

What a life, huh?
That’s the world today.

Here’s my advice—my own wisdom, if you will:

While young, do something great, and do it so well you no longer care what happens to you afterward.
This not only allows you to live with more self-confidence and assurity, but it allows you to live as if your life’s work is already completed.
That single framework gives one the freedom to be themselves, and it also makes the miseries they will encounter in life more tolerable, in that, again, they do not care what happens to them.
That’s honest living in my book.

184.

The approach of night puts a coat of fright onto children,
But for an adult it is simply the passing of time.
The transformation from ignorance to maturity is like that of a child who once feared the dark;
Who, as they grew, became like an adult, understanding it as simply a transition as the sun passes along the sky.

In ignorance do we think darkness the true light.
Man is much the same in his existential considerations.
Still a child in the ways of thought, most let life slip them by on account of their own stupidity—their desire to become nothing but a comfortable, secure, ambitionless moron.

Everyone today lives in contempt of wisdom.
If they understood what it meant, what this world and their life in it is, they would have no problem whatsoever living for themselves.
Alas, because their ambitions are not their own, they live a false life—merely actors following a script which was written for them by society, the worst dramatist of all time.

This is not to say life isn’t dramatic—in fact, almost everything we encounter is worthy of tragedy—but rather the way in which we sustain our life, through working and nothing besides, is so stifling, boring, regular, routine, and lifeless that we slowly become all those things ourselves.

That is what modernity does to us.
What a life.
What a life.

185.

Mankind cuts a strange figure in the world as a whole.
What we are, compared to the rest of the beasts of prey and burden alike, is like some god.
That is God’s relation to us, I would suspect. But let me not speculate on things far above my head.

Fortunate is the man whom fortune has given the opportunity to hear wisdom.
Very few today fathom the necessity and importance of wisdom for life.

Most take life as a rigged game set against them, and so they think the only way to win at it is to outplay and outmaneuver everyone else who is playing.
This is not only a misguided and selfish conception of what life is, but it also reveals what the main consideration at heart is with respect to people’s interpretations of life.
It is, in a very real sense, anti-life, for it doesn’t encourage others to live and doesn’t really offer the individual a real life outside of competing to be more accomplished than the next.

Why the basis of life today is made competition I will never understand, nor will I follow it, because unlike most people, I don’t play by the rules if the game itself is against my morals or principles. I do what I can to avoid the system altogether without causing others trouble.

The greatest wisdom is that which strikes the heart as true, and this idea of principles trumping custom is one of the most important pieces of judgment which a true legislator of values can reveal to others.

For the sake of self-examination, judge for yourself on all things.

Nothing is more crucial for a meaningful life than purposeful action, and that can only arise when you’ve understood your moral nature.

To know your moral nature, and the limits of where your actions will take you, you must first experiment and see for yourself what things strike you as interesting. From there, you must keep a mental note of what the experience was like; afterwards, and only afterwards, can you truly come to a right judgment on an experience.

That is the paradox of life: in order to act rightly, you must first experience for yourself the thing you wish to perform; however, never having undertaken it before, you have no idea whether it will go right or not, and so every day is lived really taking a leap of faith into the unknown.

The first sign of wisdom is realizing how much it depends on faith. From faith stems all things. We must live in faith in order to bypass the fear of doubt that comes with taking actions we’ve never undertaken before.

Have faith in yourself—which is really to say confidence in your own intelligence and judgment—in order to undertake a thing which you have never done before.

Master the leap of faith into the unknown, and you shall have life at your whims.

186.

In writing on wisdom one must necessarily use a lot of imagery.
It is a hard thing to convey what is really only grasped in a unique way for everyone.
Wisdom does not come to those who wait for it, or for those who read it somewhere in a book.

On one’s own time must they venture out into the depths of darkness which this world so abundantly provides for, literally everywhere—under every rock and secret crevice which we know not but which we can assume is there.

There is always some absurdity within wisdom, though it’s often touted as a self-evident thing which all can understand the instant it is told to them.
In truth, only the best wisdom is self-evident, but this is scarcely found anywhere, even among the supposed sages.
What wisdom acquired second-hand really amounts to is a collective of prejudices which we have assimilated into our own mind, and which on account of that we mistake for our own experience.
Because wisdom is truly only gathered in experience, to receive it from another makes it a difficult thing to understand.

All wisdom is predicated on a similarity of experience.

What is said in wise sayings can only be understood as wise if someone has had the same experience which the thing written conveys. Outside of that particular case we cannot expect to gain much from even the wisest men.
Solomon and Socrates can offer us nothing unless we have taken it upon ourselves to experience personally what they speak of very beautifully.
Hence why books only reveal as much as we bring to them, that is, how much we already know and have experienced before reading them.

In the silent hours of the night, one reads in order to become acquainted with themselves again. What our solitude reveals whilst we ruminate upon some passage from a canonical work is only what we ourselves have already known, but which we repressed out of fear that the revelation would strike the heart a bit too deeply.

Oh, how staggering experience is for those who’ve yet to acquire the wisdom necessary to appreciate it. Such is why so much of what we know comes to us in fits of inspiration, rather than through deliberate thought. Just like with writing good poetry, we cannot actively call upon our mind to give us some truth that is buried within our heart, beneath so many other feelings and impressions which we filled it with in the hope of forgetting that pain associated with truth.

Wisdom is truth without the pain—or rather, with the sensation of the pain so far removed we don’t associate it with pain anymore, but rather only the sense.

Seek your own wisdom and the world shall become a bottomless pit of insights and experience.

187.

One must always be skeptical of wisdom, even their own.
Wisdom is not an objective truth but rather an experience which has proven itself to be consistent with time and circumstance.
Of course, the moment circumstances change, so too do the conditions which made that morsel of good sense good in the first place.

As man comes to know more of life, he finds out how often the situations which made a thing work in the first case no longer apply, thanks to the passing of time and differences in attitude, mood, knowledge, and a host of other factors which are too numerous to list in their entirety.

A person can only get so far with their own understanding alone.
The world is too vast to make one perspective inherently better than another.
Indeed, it doesn’t even make sense to consider the aspects of life as being better than one another.
Some things work some days and others do not.
The confusion of life is found in the consistently inconsistent experience of it.

Our minds cannot comprehend things in a static, detached, unconnected manner. We must always build associations of experience in order to make sense of things which may not have a referent in our personal experience.

188.

Everyone wants wisdom without the burden it comes with.
Woe to those who seek after wisdom only for their vanity, or for the sake of appearing intelligent among the ignorant.
A truly wise person lets their conduct precede their reputation as a wise man.
In fact, most wise men do not realize they are wise until long afterwards.
Being wise is really a byproduct of keeping your mouth shut, your mind silent, and your eyes open.
To be wise is to be discerning and a good judge—not just of character but of existential matters as well.
A man who ponders without first experiencing is merely speculating, and as a result thinks much but with little substance.

What constitutes true wisdom is merely the accuracy of an experience as told afterwards.
Those who lust after wisdom for the sake of life are wise in that they wish to eat from the fruit of sense and discernment;
However, those that seek wisdom only for appearances—for the flaunting of facts—make themselves unwise, and lose much time, for instead of experiencing wisdom for themselves they get it through others, and thus cram and parrot all of antiquity without knowing the true meaning behind the famous maxim, ‘know thyself.’

Henry David Thoreau is perhaps best on this: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

189.

So much of what we call ‘good living’ is simply contentment matched with wisdom.

A man cannot speak wisely at all times lest he keep his lips sewed forever.
Speaking often opens a man up to foolishness, especially if he speaks on matters he knows very little about.

The world offers a man no wisdom in itself. Wisdom can only ever be a byproduct of a firm resolution tethered with a mind that seeks to improve continuously.

Let not the ‘why’ questions of life distract you from actually living it. Metaphysics never got a man anywhere—and in fact only served to make him more conceited in his own reason, and from there allowed him to justify to himself his own vanity and opinions.

When opinion is brought to the status of truth, it instantly degrades the credibility of truth altogether.

Truth is subjectivity made manifest in our objective experience of reality. The notion of truth in the Platonic sense has never done anyone favors, and has only served to constrain man to facts of the matter rather than experience as such.

Wisdom divorced from experience is not wisdom at all.

What we call life is merely the subjective representation of an a priori objective phenomenon.

190.

Often does a man feel more than he can say at any one moment.
The clearest sign of wisdom, in this case, is being able to discern which feeling is more important or thought-provoking than the other.

Wise sayings are like well-cooked meals; the longer their preparation, the better they taste.
If it were possible to say exactly what we thought at all times, there would be no need for writing what we ourselves think.
Writing was first used as an aid to memory.
I trust nothing to memory alone, for often does it fail, and man can hardly be in command of his mental faculties at all times.
What is best for man where writing is concerned is to write as it comes and edit it afterwards. The coherence of a thought matters little when one is trying to rouse their mind to the hard task of thinking.
A man cannot think at will, in the same way he cannot at all times say extemporaneously what he feels.

A true writer is one who writes only to instruct, inform, and pass on wisdom. All other writing is either miscellaneous or trite nonsense worthy of no attention whatsoever.

I wish it were possible for me to move past writing itself, but this craft is so dependent on inspiration and chance that to believe yourself capable of moving beyond it is to assume you are beyond fate (chance) itself. This is impossible, and it is only the cogitation of a vain man who seeks a thing he himself doesn’t understand.

Writing is so powerful as an art that one cannot help but feel at times that they’re doing something tremendous when they scribble a rather mundane sentence.
When we write, we’re beholden to forces we cannot control, and it’s for that reason that no man has ever been able to write well effortlessly. Even the greatest and most prolific geniuses of the pen have had to sit down and really work out for themselves what they thought, and it never came easy.

In the end with writing, I’m of the opinion that it is better for a man to say everything he thinks (even if done poorly) than to say nothing at all, or only a few well-written things. I’ve always despised the false maxim that quality is more important than quantity. I believe the opposite rather. The more quantity, the more potential there is for quality—the only downside, of course, is that it takes one longer to sift through everything written. This isn’t such a bad thing, however, for the more a man writes over time the more he becomes a better writer; and so, over many years, even his trivial thoughts become things of profound genius. One need only read the journals of Thoreau and Emerson to get a sense of what I mean.

191.

We wish we could write at all times only sound maxims, but the mind often distracts itself with other trivial thoughts that more often than not drive out what was originally thought.
It’s such a shame to see a good idea go, because we believe that should it be cast into oblivion, it is lost to time forever.
We cling to our own wisdom with such insistence that in the end we become prideful of our own understanding and turn it into vanity.

Nobody who isn’t a writer understands how much time and effort actually goes into constructing a good sentence. And even if it appears effortless on the surface, that is only because the writer has either read greatly or has thought greatly.

Thinking is like a fire which has to be constantly fed with ideas if it is to continue to produce light and heat.
Though we cannot write at all times what we think, we can write what we feel, and in doing so hope to hit upon an idea by accident which actually shocks us.
Often the best pieces of writing are those things which at first seemed trivial but in the end turned out to be very impactful.

I feel myself a slave to my own ideas at times. I say honestly, I am gripped with a strong desire to only write truthfully, and this love of truth invigorates my soul so much that I cannot help but write down what I think. I’ve grown accustomed to my own diction and style, and at this point I understand how to develop a single idea so well that I can write well on just about any topic. I am a true polygraph in the literary sense—a prolific or versatile author.

In order to write well—aside from knowing grammar and having a vast vocabulary—one needs to learn the art of explication, that is, knowing how to take a single idea and develop it fully, seeing it from all sides and thinking it through different perspectives; without this, a writer is merely a scribbler of their prejudices, but with it, a writer can play the polymathic philosophe, and undertake any idea their minds conjure up without fear or hesitation.

192.

One good idea drives out another like a nail. Wisdom is no different.
Wisdom comes and goes with the passing of our sensations.
What we consider wisdom one day will be thought folly in the next.

We are never in command of our ideas, nor are we masters of our circumstances; and so, if one is to acquire any sense of happiness or contentment in life they must approach it with tragedy ever in mind.

A man who thinks God is on his side at all times is bound to suffer a blow to his faith, for God does as He wills, and not what a man feels His will is.
Eternal is the battle of life. Life is a war in which we’re constantly raising multiple fronts in order to maximize casualties.

Nothing in this world ever goes as planned, and even if it does the joy is cherished deeply, but soon to fade shortly after it has exhausted itself.
Such is why a wise man doesn’t desire happiness or continuous good feeling, but rather contentment in the face of overwhelming misery.
Since there is a greater abundance of misery than joy in life, it behooves a man to construct his mind in such a way so as to not fear the greater possibility: sadness and regret.

Joy is temporary, and lasts but a few hours; whilst sadness is eternal, and follows us even into the grave. We can’t even escape it in death—for while we’re no longer alive to experience it, we know that our passing will cause the sadness of others. It is omnipresent and omnipotent in the suffering it spreads across the whole globe.

It’s better in the end to fear the Lord and say as little as possible. Live through much industry and simplicity, want for nothing but the love of God in the end. That is, without doubt, the surest path to tranquility and happiness a man can follow in life.

The greatest men are those who say little, think less, and cling above all else to faith in God. Let everything else go to hell.
This life is like a floor mat we wipe our shoes upon before entering into the house of God.

Holy heaven,
Brightest light,
Shining further
Than any delight;
Give us a stay
In your humble repose,
And we shall not oppose
Your truly divine way.

193.

A good first sentence often leaves the greatest impression.
Let the rest of the work be folly, but let that first sentence live.

In writing, if a man doesn’t get directly to the point with what he wishes to convey, he wastes the reader’s time, and in doing so deserves to go unread.

Many men try to sound wiser than they are when they write. This want of novelty is clear to those who have read authors who write without pretension, and, as a result, spoils the patience of competent readers, for they sense instantly when a man writes without wisdom.

Bad writers are obvious to those who have actually written a lot. One can see the desperation in their prose by the way they write—prolix, ponderous, and, above all, boring. They have no wisdom or insight to offer at all, and even if they do, it comes at the expense of time, which is more precious than whatever morsel they have in store.
The moment one detects a writer who cannot write simply, they ought to toss the book aside that very instant.

Wisdom is discernment made tangible in judgement.
What a man often calls wisdom is really just some common maxim that he’s heard all his life, and, on account of that, accepts it without question.
This is no wise man, however, for the truly wise man attempts to say his own wisdom.

Wisdom is, perhaps, the hardest thing to feign; for it requires more learning than most are able to obtain, and even if they do have the contents of books imprinted on their minds, they still need the diction necessary to make elegant and novel something simple and old. Such is why the best writings combine old, practical wisdom with a simple style.

The greatest books are those that are simple in style yet profoundly wise in content—that is, they are nearly limitless in how much can be learned and returned to in them. The three greatest examples of this are, without doubt in my mind: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, The Essays of Francis Bacon, and Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann. Of all the books I have read, these three stand out as perhaps the most harmonious blend of simplicity, brevity, elegance, and wisdom. So long as I live, I will consider these the greatest books written by man.

194.

The powers of man abate the coming dawn of flames raised too high.
Little verse, let not the age of man be shut out from the hourglass sands,
For I command the whole of man, and seek to continue on his great plans.

Wisdom finds a way in all the ages.
So few can truly consider themselves sages.
The ebb and flow and our cogitations
Make for a very confusing habitation.

The shortness of life has its own splendor.
Great things achieved in much haste and fear.
I know not what causes ambition to become dear,
But I fear all the same a day in which virtue is not engendered.

195.

There isn’t enough time in the world to give our thoughts on everything under the sun.
So long as man is condemned to his limited span of time, using only what his eyes have seen in the construction of his beliefs, he will always remain narrow in his ways and foolish in his judgments.

A man cannot claim to be wise so long as he is bound to one or two perspectives by which he views everything.
The man who yearns after a single worldview is merely looking for a framework by which to correlate all his experience;
This kind of thing, however, is not possible in a world composed of innumerable values and wills to power.
The best a man can do in life is to strategize his own plight. He must be wise in his judgments and must seek not those things his heart is not in.

Wisdom is an easy art for those who have not only experienced much but who have a mind of ready reflection.

The world, in all its grandiosity, falls short of the man who rises above the experience of it and, as it were, transcends the mere experience of a thing through the contemplation of its effect on his psyche.

The seeming omniscience of subjectivity comes from the fact that man can conceptualize himself in an objective manner. It’s a very counter-intuitive fact, but once seen, it can never be unseen.
The whole of life is perpetuated by accident via desire, and the misery that derives therefrom is only the byproduct of the cessation of desire. The moment a flame is quenched, it is out forever, and man’s joy is no different.

196.

An overcast day resembles life: mostly gray with a small chance of the beauty of the sun’s rays occasionally shining through.

Often is man left disbanded and driven back by the occurrences of everyday life. Such annoyances are so common to him he eventually comes to accept them, but never without much fear and trembling.

Oh, how mundane all things seem when taken from their appropriate perspective.

A man cannot at all times know what to say. The same is true in writing. When the thought stalls, the best thing to do is to simply reflect on the experience of the stall itself. This gives the mind the opportunity to write of the direct experience, no matter how mundane, and in getting something down often rekindles the flame of creativity which roused his spirits enough to pick up his pen in the first place.
Simple wisdom is best, and so too is simple writing.
One who wishes to say more than is necessary wishes to be seen as wise. The true wise man says nothing at all and rather conveys much through his silence.

“Hold thy tongue” should have been the 11th commandment, and the 12th should have been to never interrupt a working mind.

Man knows less of what he doesn’t know than what he knows he doesn’t know. That is to say, we are more ignorant of things than we really know we’re ignorant of.

A contradiction without profundity is a meaningless statement. A contradiction with profundity is a paradox. Paradoxes are the backbone of all dialectical/speculative thinking. Philosophy, as I have come to understand it, is merely the recognition of paradoxes—or assumed paradoxes—as they appear to those with different frameworks and perspectives. A paradox only occurs when a statement is viewed through a lens that makes it appear contradictory. Hence why the most versatile philosophical systems see nothing as a paradox but rather a thing to obtain wisdom from.

197.

Wisdom comes and goes like sense in old age. Though we feel always able to wield it, we never do so comfortably or with assurance that we shall have it forever.

Some things are so obvious they need not be said, but then again, a man has only one life, and thus must make the best use of his time by reading and writing only those things that strike him throughout his precious seconds.

Man is a thinking beast limited by his nature. We have only a short time to be alive, and thus must strive after those things which we feel may be of use to not only ourselves but others as well.
A fool gathers many things thinking they’ll be used by him, but in the end he only piles junk atop junk and never does anything with it but leaves it as junk.

A hoarder sees a need for everything but has a use for nothing. A scholar does the same thing but with ideas. An erudite man is only a hoarder of other people’s experiences and expertise. That’s why I prefer the study of philosophy over any other discipline: it allows a man to not only become familiar with the history of ideas and intellectual prejudices, but it offers him a multitude of frameworks in which to test his own ideas—hopefully with the end result that he develops his own system of philosophy, and in that sense becomes a philosopher himself.

Everyone is born a philosopher because everyone has an innate desire to know and to question things. What distinguishes the posers from the real ones is the ability to come to conclusions via independent judgment, free from any outside influence. One should read Plato and Aristotle and Hegel but not take their ideas as final. Ideas are only as good as they are useful existentially. All else is folly.

My advice to anyone interested in philosophy but unsure where to start is to simply jump into the works of the author that piqued your interest originally. A single philosophical work, if it’s good, will suggest a thousand others. Over many years, you’ll have familiarized yourself with so many ideas that you can actually dare to use your own understanding in interpreting them.

Thought is merely an interpretation inspired by instinct and sustained through interest. What we do ultimately comes down to chance and circumstance. We would not be what we are today were it not for accidental forces always at play in the backdrop of our lives which we can never be privy to. We’re all walking shadows who shall fade into nothingness the instant our life is swallowed by the night of the world. We run on contradictions, and we overcome them through the narratives we tell ourselves. That is the basis of our existence. Take away suffering from a man and he shall make some for himself. Either that or he’s dead. One or the other. Both are ghastly in the end.

198.

Everything is interesting until it isn’t.
A man can sustain his hope for only so long. So long as he has a reason, he shall always bear what he must for the sake of his life. Take the foundation from under his feet and he shall fall, constantly stumbling forever after on weary legs.

We feel so much, yet our words reflect so little. The greatest hurt to a man who feels his sufferings passionately is that he cannot say to others why he suffers so. So confused is man when questions of feeling are concerned that he sinks into an intellectual stupor from which he cannot wake.

Life is clearly a mistake, but because it is also a test, the answer already given cannot be corrected while still receiving full credit. Everything in the world falls into dissolution. The fact that mankind actually has the power to overcome that fact through sheer ignorance is astonishing to me.

Intellectuals are the hardest people to relate to—and this is because seeking wisdom and erudition for their own sake is a foreign concept to the majority of people, and has been since the beginning. The lives of most people in history have been mean, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; this fact has only encouraged man to seek gain rather than wisdom to avoid the hurt its absence causes.

With everything in the subjective life of man fundamentally being an interpretation, it necessarily follows that all mental suffering (which is the majority of our suffering in the modern world) is based on a misplaced judgment. We assign a thing value which we do not possess, and not having it is the very thing that encourages us to work towards it in order to obtain it. Leaving aside the fact that once we do obtain our desire we’ll just hanker after another misguided desire, it seems as if the option of simply not desiring a thing never occurs to most people. There are very few genuine dichotomies (that is to say, they aren’t false dichotomies), but the dual nature of desire and contentment is one such paradox. You can either be content with what you already have or enslave yourself to labor for the sake of obtaining your desire; one is inspired by the want of peace and tranquility, while the other is spurred on by ambition. Whichever one you ultimately choose is dependent on which one you value more.

I shudder at the thought of what modernity has become: a race to the bottom encouraged by weak, life-denying values—everyone simply wants the ability to live without needing to work for it; sloth and nothing besides is the way of the modern world. Nietzsche’s “last man,” or better still Dostoevsky’s underground man; both are archetypes of the same human being, which is slowly what all people today are turning into.

199.

It takes a certain psychology to appreciate the insight of the wise.

Though men have written everything that could possibly need to be written already, every generation has a few people crazy enough to think themselves capable of saying some old idea in a new way, and better than how it was originally said. These people must have some vanity about them, but their ambition for noble ends is admirable, and for that reason should be encouraged in this exercise.

Very often we say what we feel but never what we mean, and vice versa. One who can say both what they feel and mean is a great speaker indeed.

When things are comfortable, ambition dies, and this spells the gradual decline of not only a man’s life but also civilization as a whole. Every civilization comes to dust just like man, only it leaves in its wake potentially new cultures and societies to form.

Wisdom that doesn’t attend to the heart is mere intellectual flattery.

I hate those who agree with me on something simply because I said it well, or because I have the evidence behind it; agreement should only come when the conviction of what I said resonates with the person’s own moral nature. Arguments from ethos (credibility) or logos (logic) are not real arguments in my opinion; because man ultimately agrees with what aligns with his values—which is something logic or credentialism alone can never convince him otherwise—it follows that every argument levied is secretly an argument from pathos (emotion). Emotions are values that have fossilized in the heart of man—that is to say, the instincts of man were first forged in response to existence, and thus took on a pathos-like aspect.

200.

Trouble comes unto a man like the sun unto the trees.
Whatever lies beneath a sea of troubles is bound to drown long before it rises to the surface.

A little breath, a little life. A little sleep, a little death. All of life revolves around confronting annoyances that drive us to the brink of insanity without actually losing ourselves.
In order to live, man must learn how to appreciate his productivity born out of his anger and contempt for life.
Life is always bound to be unhappy the longer you brood on the miserable aspects of it. I suppose this is a thing one can never grow tired of, however, for the unhappiness of life is always the primary impetus that causes us to contemplate in the first place.

The world approaches us like an overcast sky that clearly shows signs of gray in it.
Rain is sure to follow, and, being wet, we regret having ever gone outside in the first place.
Rain spoils everything beautiful by drowning it in a sea of tears. It is nature crying before its own beauty. I hate to see beautiful things cry, however—that’s why I say it spoils everything. Don’t cry, dearest nature, but rather rejoice at the day for having come, and let the sun’s rays abound rather than be blocked by your clouds of despair.

201.

The prose of the KJV is to be admired not only for its elegance but also for its constant use of imagery. Such is that for which all who write should strive.

There is in writing always a sense of dissimulation. We turn from ourselves as the winds turn against the sails of a ship. Never do we find peace within our minds; hence, all truthful writing resembles some rough mosaic which can only be appreciated from afar.

Writing that only gets at the sense is poor. Writing should always appeal not only to the sense but also to the soul. What is a man but a soul carrying a body anyway?

All that we see can potentially be a source of wisdom. Those with eyes to see beauty and a mind for understanding knowledge have all they need to write well. The best writers are those who, with great brevity, reveal the contents of their souls in an illuminating and inspiring way.

Wisdom is ignored by the fool but taken into the heart by the wise man.

Solomon’s prose is to be admired not necessarily for its truthfulness but for its clarity and consistency. The wise king who knew all was vanity had a particular genius for writing a proverb down without concerning himself with where it fit in the overall structure. In this, he did what all good writers following him have done: he wrote in the moment of inspiration and worried about its placement in the whole only afterwards.

202.

Every common piece of wisdom has its own unique effect on us, and has its own time and place within our lives.
Though man confronts the world as best he can, he is often dragged along by it without much aid or comfort.
Only in wisdom does man find some refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

One can turn their mind upon anything, but they cannot master everything. The hardest pill to swallow for an intellectual is that their knowledge is always inferior to the collected wisdom of past ages.
Always must we find new ways of approaching the day. To cling too tightly to a routine softens the mind and makes a man grow intellectually lazy.
A mind is best exercised not when it crams or studies without purpose, but rather when it finds a way to incorporate information seamlessly.
In learning, one must never forget that all things are connected to everything else. Where one connection is made, a thousand others can easily spring up. Only as a collective can discrete facts receive certain interpretations that make their place in the larger whole more comprehensible. If a man cannot connect one fact with another, he is incapable of interpreting information; and if he cannot do that, he cannot learn, nor can his own thoughts amount to much.

203.

Wisdom should only try to reveal things which are not obvious.

The essence of all good writing is being able to say well what the reader couldn’t work out for themselves in the thought conveyed. The same, I think, should apply to wisdom. Let it only tell of things which may or may not be known to the individual reading them.

The best wisdom is that acquired through personal experience. Of course, the vanity of wisdom is that it doesn’t apply across all times, nor does it necessarily apply to the person who spoke such a wise thing in the future.
Wisdom, like a good aphorism, is always only a temporary truth, which changes like the seasons with regularity depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in at the moment of their revelation.

All knowledge is vain in the end, for it lasts no longer than it is useful to us in its application. Everything that is not used is bound to be lost by us as time progresses.

The greatest analogy to life is that of wisdom itself. We’re constantly working towards its increase, and the more we pile it on, the more difficult it becomes to manage. As in knowledge, so in life: a man of great understanding comes to hate all that his experience has told him, not because it isn’t true or useless to him, but because he cannot change the hearts of others through good sense alone. Such is why values are so important.

Give a good man the wrong set of values and he will become a villain. Give a bad man the right set of values and he will become a changed man for the better. What we value ultimately determines what we are, and it is for that reason why we’re capable of changing ourselves in the first place. A man’s nature (being) precedes his essence, and so whatever superficial nonsense he takes up in youth can easily be surpassed as maturity comes upon him and he adopts more mature aspirations.

The sun always shines brightest after the parting of many clouds.

Wisdom falls upon all men in different ways. What allows one to see a thing one day may not necessarily occur again the next day; such is why one must have patience with wisdom. You cannot call upon it willingly; rather, it calls upon you, and in its calling must you listen and heed it, lest you become like the fool in ignoring it.

204.

See much, say little, and think only the best.

Everything trite does have a hint of truth within it. A thing is only recognized as true or important when it conforms to the expectation of experience. What we know, we know thanks to what we have heard, read, or felt for ourselves.

I don’t like repeating myself in writing, but I fear it cannot be avoided in thinking; when one is forced to give their mind over to thinking, they inevitably find themselves thinking the same thoughts someone before them had. It’s no wonder Harold Bloom said the thoughts of everyone in modernity are simply the thoughts of Shakespeare reiterated less beautifully.

There’s almost nothing a man can say that’s truly new. Nothing new under the sun, and everything which lies beneath it shall go the way of everything else. From dust to dust, ashes to ashes, we all fall down eventually.

Mankind is one plague away from remembering the importance of God.

What catastrophe has to occur for us to be awakened from this senseless consumerism, I know not, and quite frankly, I don’t think I want to speculate on the future of humanity: the more I do, the less hopeful I feel toward the future altogether. I know too much history to be optimistic about the trajectory of civilizations, to say nothing of man’s endless stupidity, vanity, and cruelty.

The human race is a bundle of savages who lash out at any perceived threat. We find fighting easier than understanding—and more direct, too—and so it’s no wonder the core human impulse has always been bent toward dissolution, decay, degradation, and death.

Some life we lead. Some suffering we endure. Some sadness we encounter. Some misery we leave. Death, that sweet shadow of blissful nothingness, we welcome thee patiently, and hope that in faith we shall be saved afterwards. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. We can only hope in the end that He takes pity on our failings and is pleased by our successes.

205.

All wisdom is based on repetition. Often does something well said have to be repeated in order for it to truly stick in the person’s mind. Do it enough times and the person will adopt it as their own, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll follow it.

Often is wisdom turned into a platitude by how often it’s repeated. That’s why one should only seek wisdom when their heart yearns for some sense.

A strong mind isn’t necessarily an active one. The best minds throughout history have all known themselves well enough to recognize when the time was right for them to think and when not to, and in knowing that went on to be very productive.

We today often think it’s necessary for us to always be doing something productive, but in truth, the less one concerns themselves with the task before them, the better they complete it in the end.

A heart that follows the path of wisdom will be shattered on the rocks if they turn wisdom into the only love they have. A heart must feel multiple kinds of love if it is to truly know itself. If one doesn’t have a wide range of experiences by which to draw, one cannot use wisdom well; wisdom can only be employed properly when a sufficient amount of life has already been encountered in order to discern which supposedly wise statements actually hold up to reality.

It’s often argued that wisdom is eternal: I disagree. Wisdom is, like truth, dependent on perspective, experience, and circumstance. One wise thing today sounds foolish tomorrow. What we say and do now will influence us in the future, but the actual saying and doing will be completely forgotten by us then, and yet the experience has made us what we are. Such is the way of all knowledge, I think: the truly existential and important stuff is never forgotten by us, and whatever technical knowledge we possess from school or interest really only serves us in a material rather than existential manner—which is why it’s constantly having to be relearned and overcome, whereas what we feel in our hearts intuitively is there forever, like God’s divine love.

206.

Our wisdom is only as good as the moment which brought it about in the first place.

We are never equal to our circumstances, but we are at all times able to derive some benefit from them.

Wisdom is the power to discern what is and isn’t in line with our own moral nature. The end of all knowledge should be to strengthen, hone, and perfect our moral nature.
One only learns who they are after much experience and self-reflection—that is, after they’ve familiarized themselves with what really speaks to them in life.
A man who goes about his day wondering but never doing will never know who he is. A person must let life overwhelm them (only for a time, of course) if they are to see to what extent they’re capable of enduring the absurdity of it.

Just as one’s heart must always be filled with love toward the world, one’s mind should always be upon themselves and their circumstances if they are to derive any existential benefit from experience as such. A person who doesn’t introspect loses themselves in a sea of differing narratives and perspectives which they cannot reconcile; this inability to develop a personal framework by which to make sense of reality is, I think, the major cause of disenchantment and anxiety toward life for most people today. There are people in this world who are happy with nothing and beg for their bread every day, and there are materially successful people who go on to end themselves despite having everything society encouraged them to acquire and work toward. How does this come about? In my view, the answer is very simple: they have different sets of values, different perspectives by which to understand their reality; this affords them a view of life that is not only coherent but which is beneficial to them. One view is existential (subjective), while the other is material (“objective”). One more often than not leads to happiness, while the other leads to burnout and suffering.

Anxiety is an overreaction to life. In order to bypass it, one must either avoid completely those things that produce it—which most lack the means to do—or they must develop ways of coping with it, often done by viewing the situation through a different interpretative lens.

207.

A man comes upon wisdom as a child does nature. There’s a certain alienated majesty associated with enlightenment. It is always necessarily personal, and yet, when we experience it, we at once feel like fools for not having known it all this time.

Man will never be equal to what he knows in his heart; he will always be forced to carry the weight of his own experience, unrecognizable to himself yet so fully him. What profit comes upon a man able to psychoanalyze and dialectically interrogate his own past? I would say very little.

Wisdom is but the dross of experience. Life is but the temporary consciousness of some object that has come to see itself as a subject. The illusion of life is found in the value which we ascribe to it through some rational narrative which is itself pre-rational. Before Kant, man was simply the subject who recognized objects—after him, the subject within all objects as understood through our transcendental categories.

We shall always want for something so long as we feel our life is incomplete in some way. Mankind has never been happy with mere being—it has always had the ambition for more, and has done everything in its power to justify to itself why it needs to act in the way it does. Unlike the beasts of the field, who act on instinct alone and only do what serves them in the immediate moment, man has the ability to see beyond himself, as it were, and in doing so forgo the gratification of instinctual desire for the sake of the abstraction he came up with in his head.

The human race is so constituted that everyone with a functioning mind develops reasons for himself regarding everything they do. We today no longer live purely on instinct; the instincts themselves only guide our desires, but most worthwhile endeavors are pursued whilst delaying the gratification of said desires. The greater the ambition, the longer that gratification has to be delayed; the more joy is to come, as well, when the goal is finally achieved.

Wisdom comes not when we want but when it wants.

208.

What we think is important one day passes away into the next. We are constantly striving after unseen things, felt in our hearts and even justified in our minds already, but overall unknown to us truly.

The truth of life is too hard for most people to swallow. Most prefer to listen only to the sounds of birds and drink deeply of wine and mirth, but the instant reality strikes them and causes stripes to break out upon their backs, they grow resentful and turn away more and more from life overall. Always will life remain impossible for us to comprehend fully.

Every narrative is a prejudice. Every life is a lie. Every object is a goal that seeks fulfillment but loses its joy the instant it is accomplished. People cannot be both optimistic and pessimistic without, in some way, having a conceptual framework by which to harmonize both—which necessarily implies that their framework is dialectical. Life is vain without speculative inquiry. Anyone who doesn’t question life seriously, who doesn’t investigate it for themselves existentially, who only seeks to follow a narrative which either society or youth brought to them on a silver platter, is still a child in my opinion.

To take an inventory of all that has occurred to you in life—and further still, to pass judgment on all of it through some cloudy interpretative lens—is the hard task of philosophy, and until they have done this, they cannot seriously consider themselves true thinkers. To be a real thinker is simply to think for yourself on all matters with as little influence or prejudice from others as possible; it is, in a sense, to only come to conclusions about the world through your own experience alone—and though your experience may lead you down dark and foreboding paths, the knowledge acquired from that experience will turn into wisdom in the end, which is more than any ready-made philosophical system can provide you.

209.

“I don’t know that, but experience tells me that.” Let that be the only true aspect behind truth itself. People love to hold truth above themselves, when it has always been only a matter of what they already saw within themselves with respect to it. Truth is like wisdom in that it only comes to us after the fact of experiencing it. Our interpretation of reality is the truth, which is why truth must always be subject to revision and dialectical skepticism.

Truth has never done a man any good so far as it was separated from his soul—which is what all schools, colleges, and academic institutions alike today have tried to do: to rend the truth from the soul by more or less agreeing (unanimously) on a conception of truth that removes the soul, and even removes the subject for that matter. Truth in the modern conception is the following: a consensus supported by ‘evidence’; rather than what it really is, a process of gradual becoming, in which the experience itself is constantly reinterpreted for the sake of conforming to the present subjectivity of the individual.

210.

In giving my heart to wisdom, I found that all was folly within it. I now realize that a life only lived for the sake of wisdom turns quickly to vanity. One who chases after wisdom chases after the wind, and discovers at the end of all one’s studies that ignorance is more prevalent than intelligence, and that the life of most men is built upon labor and anguish which no amount of reflection alleviates. Hence, vain distractions and folly are so common among the majority of mankind, and have been for most of time.

I despise wisdom while at the same time wanting to become one with it. I have bitten from much fruit of the tree of knowledge, but found no real satiety. My hunger and ambition for more and more knowledge drove me on a path of careless consumption of information for the sake of culture and erudition. It profited me very little in the end. What I found was that my goal was misguided. I thought in having wisdom I would have answers for life as a result. As it turned out, nothing could be further from the truth.

Wisdom is vanity, for one sees the futility of its application as one is actually forced to live in a world that is not guided by reason or wisdom—worse still, in a world where reason and wisdom are actively discouraged and hated by the majority with all their hearts. They’ll say with their lips all the praises they can upon reason and wisdom, but in their hearts, they’re great despisers of them.

Wisdom only comes to those who wait, but life for most today is lived in haste, and moves so fast that one must necessarily go insane at the thought of it should one actually try to slow down whilst in the midst of so much movement and speed and stress. It’s all too much, and offers very little in the way of a clear interpretation of it all. No new frameworks have yet been devised for modernity, and the longer we hold out for a contemporary philosophy of culture, the faster we descend into the night of the world.

211.

All is vanity so long as vanity is meant to represent life as it truly is. Forever must we be working against the forces that distract us and weaken us.

Woe to those who seek strength for the sake of life. Life is a vain thing, and the harder one works at it, the more they reveal its emptiness and vain circularity.

We are always coming up with ways to justify our own existence to ourselves. The true absurdist lives without answers—nay, without wanting answers—they are truly ensconced in the depravity of their situation, and their freedom appears like a mockery to them: it offers them no real change, and whatever they vent in moments of frustration comes to little; hence comes hopelessness and gloom on an existential scale.

Existential despair is precisely found in the inability to overcome the unthinkable aspects of life: the fact that one must live today by enslaving themselves to a narrative told to them by their material conditions, rather than by their own souls, is the existential contradiction of modernity. It may be said that all suffering today directly springs from this contradiction. So long as man is forced to create his meaning out of materials not picked by his own hands, he will always feel alienated from his own soul, his own person—what he is as a conscious being means little when reduced to what his own labor can get him for the sake of his subsistence. Modernity is subsistence made existential, and so long as this abounds, so too will dread and despair for all human beings alike.

Where there is no outlet to vent repressed feelings, there is only discontent and rage, both of which swell and congeal into hate and nihilism. Most people who break from reality and go insane by the mere fact of living within it do so as a result of their inability to comprehend their internal struggles—it’s always a spiritual battle at the end of the day, and the more our values are misguided and selfish, the more we’ll view the world as giving us the cold shoulder, rather than opening up to us with appreciation and respect.

Narratives run all things, even wisdom, and so we have to have a way of comprehending everything with our own narratives without losing ourselves in everything, while also not becoming too influenced by the narratives of others. Cooperation should never be fealty; it should rather be centered around collective goals inspired by the same values (more or less). Any conception of the world outside of that strikes me as deeply unpragmatic, as well as being non-dialectical—which makes it a nonstarter in my view.

212.

I don’t like to hear advice from people not in my own dire circumstances.

The world is so unbalanced and unhinged that any conception of it must necessarily prove its depravity in the end. Seek for things wise in this world and conclude with great sadness that nothing is truly good, wise, noble, or everlasting. Vanity upon vanities is all we heap up for our labors, and the more we work, the more we feel betrayed by life.

Life is worth nothing in the end, and such is why the majority assume, with perfectly good sense, that it is best to make the most of it by having fun and forgetting all reason or considerations of the future. This is what modernity has more or less perfected within man subconsciously.

The moral nature of mankind today is so opposed to flourishing, cooperation, prosperity, or progress that one must sell themselves to the devil of a false narrative in order to live at all. Each day we live, we’re playing a game we didn’t consent to join but must play anyway, lest we die from want of the necessities.

Philosophy has become nothing more than a storehouse of cant platitudes and worthless factoids that offer no insight. The materials necessary to make a wise man have never been further from us than they are now.

Knowledge is of no interest to anyone on its own today; it has become completely subordinate to career ambitions, which makes it impossible to love it with any authenticity. America is still stuck in the 1800s when it comes to its conception of what education is for. It’s still in the shadow of the Prussian model adopted by Horace Mann from his travels in Germany; then again, I suppose Jefferson’s model, which he formed for the University of Virginia, wasn’t much better.

Nobody really has the ability to appreciate education unless it is valued by the person already for its own sake. The end of knowledge should not be made a career, and the more it is, the more society overall will suffer from brain rot and general stupidity; again, because education that is not valued for the rich insight it brings to an individual’s life will always be derided as a mere abstraction—nice in sentiment but useless in practice. So goes the way of knowledge, off a cliff’s edge into a sea of ignorance immensely large and unwieldy.

213.

We only know as much as the day reveals to us in the light of experience.
Endless are desires and forever are the pains we take upon ourselves to acquire them.
I hate that all things must end in vanity and vexation of spirit.
Anyone honest with themselves will admire Ecclesiastes not for its insight necessarily but for its honesty.
I love the ones who doubt with all their heart. Oh, how we free spirits are always searching for the thing that will put a stop to our searching. We never find, but we place all our hope in that narrative: the narrative that one day we will no longer need to look in order to live.

Every wise man considers himself unwise for two reasons: the first is that he knows all his knowledge amounts to very little in the end; and the second is that the wise man knows to what extent his own ignorance reaches—the more he knows, the more he sees how much there is to actually know.
I was always too humble to openly show my intelligence. Better it is for a man to remain silent about everything, even those things he supposedly knows very well, than to open his mouth and prove himself a fool as a result.

Time passes before us like the air before our eyes; we see it not, but know when it has passed, when it has changed, and when it is lacking. If only we had more time to live all our lives to their fullest ideal. Alas, the world is not organized for our happiness but rather for our labor, anger, and frustration. What comes of a man’s labor but death and destruction in the end?

We must always consider our lives in the face of their end; to do anything else is really to stutter before the world. People place too much hope in their narratives, wishing that the sound of their own ambition will overpower the approaching shockwave of reality. Vanity of vanities. Vexations of spirit. The soul within us and the spiritual law beyond us bend to the reality of their oblivion. Not us, oh Lord, not us. Spare us.

214.

In the mode of parody I begin.
In fact, let me be a disgrace to parody. I no longer want to amuse but to lament.
Yes, let my sorrow run forth, and in the end let me exit the world as I came into it.
To darkness I run, and to light I hide within.
The day is precious to me, for I feel the air and see the trees. The clouds are gloomy and my soul is content with their grayness.
I see the little leaf being flung about by the wind. The sight is dear to my heart, and my tears flow forth at the sight of something so divine, so precious, so true, so natural and honest.
I have longed for some recovery from all my wisdom, but I receive nothing but vexation for all my vain efforts to overcome my soul. My plight is staggering to me, yet to you, it is only words. Wow! What a sentence. What a bold face I put on before my readers, only to reveal it was only a mask in the end.

I am the enigma that never tires of its own contradiction and deliberate confusion. Everyone today wants only comfort and security, a family and an affordable house. Curses be upon those who only seek their wellness in objects they must labor to acquire. I have always thought it easier to love nature and spend time reflecting on its beauty to be satisfied.
The man of wisdom finds all labor vain, and such is why most intellectuals, scholars, thinkers, artists, free spirits, and deep readers have been considered by the majority as lazy, slothful folk too concerned with their own ideas to actually live. There’s some truth in the criticism—for thinking in and of itself advances a person’s life not one step—but like all good criticism it also reveals its own prejudice and opposite: the person who does not think only lives for their belly, and as a result their conception of life extends no further than their material concerns. Everyone is made deliberately narrow today because they have no narrative of their own to live by; as a result they degrade and hate those who are independent of mind enough to not follow along with the zeitgeist.

Every narrative is a lie. Every life is a prolonged episode of hysteria. Anyone who actually has ambition feels so either out of compulsion from within or is pulled from without (by society). Either way, it is all vanity, and those who cannot see this are still children in the realm of thought: clinging to the ‘facts’ of life, their own material interest, their own selfishness, their own inequity.

Everything is vain. Joy is short as is life, and hope avails us not unless faith has God at its head. Love not this life, but only tolerate it in order that you may praise the Lord in overcoming the challenges He gives you in it.
Life is such a vain affair, and anyone who claims happiness commits a monstrous fallacy—nay, they likely lie willingly. Oh, whatever. I bore myself with my own ramblings on the endless infinity that is reality. I could write and write and write—which I have done to a certain extent, in fact—and still find no end to all the ways in which I could make variations upon this central theme: life is not good in the end, and all comes to darkness. We walk in darkness as we live, followed by a shadow of ignorance that ought to put the fear of God within us, in order that the wisdom we receive from such humiliation before Him makes everything in the end worth it.

Ah, but what good is wisdom in the end if all labor on Earth, even if for God, comes to dust. It matters not I suppose, and this is the insight of the herd that every intellectual has to grapple with seriously: the herd have very little understanding and less wisdom, yet they seem perfectly happy after coming home from work to their equally ignorant and vain children. I will never understand that particular sacrifice, that particular set of values, that particular material ambition which a man always subordinates himself to.
Alas, I will never understand anything. My words are but air, destined to the dustbin of reality. I shall become nothing in this world with my death, and I deeply desire to become nothing whilst I live, in order that I may maintain consistency with the way of things. The Western conception of man as the Faustian who cast his will into the world in order to reel in some profound social destiny is utterly absurd. Few men actually are Faustian; it’s for that reason I find Carlyle more agreeable than Spengler—both are wrong, but Spengler is more so. I think a good argument could be made that the “great man” theory of history is more accurate than the cyclical repetitions of collapse and growth. All theories of history are wrong: that’s perhaps why I love Will Durant the most; he merely explained what happened in history, and in a prose style never to be matched by any historian afterwards.

215.

We’re always seeking after some light, which in the end only reveals the great darkness behind us.

Who has lived in this world who can truly say they have known happiness consistently? I venture to say that all is vexation of spirit so long as man must labor at all to live. There is no happiness in labor—the point of it was to punish Adam for his rebuke against the Lord.

Life presents itself as a task to be finished with already; it’s like a homework assignment that is due the next day but has infinite questions on it. The stress is palpable, and the more we stress over it, the shorter we live. Perhaps the best way to live life is in constant fear and trembling. At least with that, you have an honest perspective of what life really is.

The man who longs for wisdom really longs for an end to his doubt. In such an age of collapse, decay, degeneracy, and overall hopelessness, anxiety is a constant companion, and we throw it off only after we’ve done the hard work of living—most leave this world smiling, for they know their great battle is finally at an end. Blessed are the dead, and blessed are those who are never born. Blessed are those who know not the sufferings of this life. Blessed are those who never come to experience the pain of loss, the pain of love, the pain of living, of judging, making ends meet, etc.

All is vanity. Vanity atop vanity, and misery atop misery—suffering too, and all the gloom that comes upon the world like some dark cloud, a fog impenetrable, and whose magnitude is so vast it encircles the entire Earth. Ah yes! That there is perhaps the best personification I could give humanity. Life is no different from wind, a nothing which comes and goes and leaves not a trace that it ever was. That is life. Accept it and endure anyway. Find something to live by. Make all this unquestionable misery mean something in the end. That is all we can do. Find a goal or meaningful narrative by which to comprehend all things under the sun, and you shall have the world for a plaything.

216.

All of wisdom is but a vain attempt to escape the vanity of existence.
Every human heart moves to the tune of its own misery. The vanity we experience in a day passes away just like some sickness we are struck with right at the moment of our greatest triumph.

What is life to a man without God? An empty affair.

All that I try to say, and will try to say, in all my writings is merely the expression of what I see the world as through my own eyes. Anyone who writes with objectivity and facticity in mind will fail to achieve their goal overall, for one is not moved by facts alone, but by the relation of the fact to experience. Only in subjectivity can one really be understood.

The longer one tries to approach life objectively, the more they see how vain facts truly are. If one wishes to turn themselves against facts, all they have to do is take them seriously for a few years existentially—they’ll shock themselves by how useless they are in the end.

Nothing proves more useless than wisdom when the world that comprises that sapience is controlled by unwise people.

217.

Though most of life is without sense, there are pockets of reason into which one can escape during times of trouble.

A man’s mind is always beset with difficulties from the moment he awakes. The best remedy for mankind is to simply forget. What’s done is done, and in the end, where will all our complaints lead us? Nothing but more complaint and misery. Will our tears bring us closer to heaven? Perhaps to God, but not to our salvation.

All good writing is necessarily repetitive because to repeat is to say again what one has taken a fondness towards in thought. If the thought is good, honest, and true, it matters little how many times it is repeated; a pearl loses not its luster with the passing of time but with the passing of perspectives viewed in conjunction with it.

The object is for the subject and vice versa. The subject, however, feels itself beyond the object it is for the other. Hence comes the need for recognition.

Have as many thoughts as you like; they will all end the same way—in vanity and despair.

All of life may be summarized as an attempt to constrain the impulses which send it hither and thither, all for naught and without real purpose behind it.

We take action not only to sustain life but to hope that in acting we find a meaning in it. Meaning is never without a value that first captures the imagination. We are roused from sloth by the possibility of our obtaining favor through our accomplishments; there is an evaluation with respect to our present state which leaves us dissatisfied, and in order to feel beyond this dissatisfaction, we do things which we think will bring us contentment. Alas, we never do find contentment in life, but we do get along well enough the more we work towards our goals with diligent action. Most only want to appear adorned with their accomplishments, but those who act for their own sake are adorned by their activity alone. Let our attempts be greater than the final masterpieces we create.

218.

The central aspect behind all existential writing is repetition. If a man doesn’t know how to repeat himself well, he cannot be called a good writer, let alone an introspective thinker.

All things are transitory and come apart at the seams the instant fate lifts up her hands.

Life is a battlefield strewn about with thousands of corpses; these corpses represent all our ambitions and desires in the end. In the end, we’re all dead.

Let only a love for truth abound in the youth, and a deep desire for security reign in the breast of the aged. Every part of life has its time and place. Whatever is out of sync with man cannot be said to go right. The heart knows when a wrong is done against it, even if the wrong is of a metaphysical nature. The intuition of man knows better than the reason of man.

What we look for in life is a little stability tethered with some comfort from another soul. Human beings want only one thing—happiness!—and I find it so vain and venal a goal that I feel we place a veil before our eyes when we enter the world expecting to make some happiness for ourselves within it. The man who hankers after happiness will find nothing but misery in the end; and the man who goes humbly through the world with a stern focus on his ambitions will also find misery, but at least a man of serious resolve already knew that going into his ambition.

Do you now see why I think life is better lived as little as possible, with no ambition, with no wish to appear more accomplished or successful than another? All this is but wind, and time cares not for our desires to outlive it, for we find ourselves returning to the Earth again and again. Memento mori, et mundus facilis fiet. (Remember to die, and the world will be made easy.)

Every action geared towards an abstraction as the end goal will always leave us more dissatisfied than an actual sensation experienced by us in the objective world. Hence, the wicked prefer the sensual over the conceptual—they want to feel physically rather than emotionally or spiritually; their hearts couldn’t bear the weight of a serious reflection, and so they only give their time to those things which they see before their eyes. That’s also why most practical people are thoroughly ignorant of literature or culture in general: what isn’t before their eyes may as well not exist. Stupid, ignorant, barbaric savages.

219.

Set not about making books of your own wisdom, but rather only for your own contentment, pleasure, and edification.

Much study in learned matters is sloth, and the scholar who aims to live only in books shall be weary of the flesh.

All that we come to know in life is really an accident, and all that we take to heart is only so because we find it useful enough in the practice of our affairs. Life would be good if it had no public complexion; everything in the world turns about misery so long as its sole concern is labor for its own sake. I cannot think of a more degrading and Godless life than the one lived by the wicked today. There have always been slothful parasites that do nothing but sit and stare at the sky, but their own ways are rebuke enough against them. They are poor, and that is misery enough.

I cannot stand the thought of having so much wisdom, yet being unable to relate it in some way to others for their own uplifting. Anyone with a good mind who uses it only to obtain a good living for themselves is no different from idlers in my book. They only act selfishly, and as a result heap up massive riches for themselves but pollute society with their selfish attitude; imagine a world in which everyone had such ambition—everything would stagnate, and luxury would become the purpose of life.

I despise life not because the core of it is suffering, but because the powerful few think the goal of it (at present, at least) is to spread and kindle as much suffering as possible across the entire globe. The world at present is led by the worst among us. Vanity of vanities! Vexations of spirit! The phenomenology of our spirit is one long vexation, a vanity matched only by the absurdity of life.

Often, when we return to a song we love that we haven’t heard in a long time, we spot things in it that we missed upon first listening to it. The greatest joy in listening to music is finding a new aspect of it to appreciate. The greatest musicians are those who can combine excitement with seriousness—every theme in a musical piece should reflect life, or the heart, in some way. A composer must be able to make the heart weep at an adagio, while being able to make the heart leap at an allegro.

Music is the soul of life manifest in sound; it is the highest form of creativity a person can engage with. A note is a higher expression of the spirit than a period. Music encapsulates experience better than any other medium because of the force it excites within the ears; the proximity of the ears to the brain vivifies the entire head, and thus restores the soul to its former vigor. Without music, life would be an endless tragedy. What were the choruses of ancient Greek drama but the expression of the audience’s grief and joy simultaneously? Music is a long catharsis, and that’s why it shocks us even after it’s finished.

220.

I am beset with flame. The sun rises over me and shines down upon me. My face is bright. I am fair, and my lover bathes in the rays like some stunning diamond.

The scent of pine is not too far behind, and against the backdrop of the sky, my lover dances before me merely by walking. Look here how she holds the rose in her hands.

My lover knows what catches my eye, and just how to knock me silly on the ground in awe! She walks in beauty coated in honey, beloved little bunny!

She smiles at me. Look here! She holds the rose up again before her shining face. Oh, she smiles at the rose whilst holding it up to the sun. She makes music though she says none.

In that smile I see the whole world presented. Oh, her dearest smile. Her teeth, white like crystal, shining like pearls—on this world no muse can match her twisting curls.

She knows her beauty—oh so keenly!—and her modesty heightens it supremely. Oh, what a face, what a complexion—swarthy and delightful like a sweet confection.

Oh my, this woman is my greatest delight. In her my love is kindled. My passions runneth over, and my cup of mirth is filled a thousand times over.

For her and her alone do I burn. She is the only one for whom I yearn. I feel the flame within burning brightly, and my spirits move around oh so lively.

Angel sent down from heaven! Dear God, what a face—such magnificence leaves us in disbelief! “Can it be real, such beauty!” we say to ourselves.

It stands before us like some diamond pure. In all her greatness does she shine, and in her wits—a poet divine!—she speaks of things most sublime.

Oh my God! I love this woman. I want only her. None can best her, and that’s the belief for me.

I love this woman!

221.

Come upon me, gentle beauty. Rouse my flame, and make me seize the day.
In you I find life fulfilled. No greater burning fire can cast itself upon this Earth.
Whilst I look at you, I see beauty perfected, and admire not even the roses when held up against your face.
What a sensation you bring upon my spirits. I am dizzy with sense, and confused, I stumble towards you to embrace your beauty in full.

We hug and stare at each other, enchanted whilst our minds go everywhere.
You fall upon my lap. We both, in heat, simmer together, and gaze upon the stars whilst we dream of our future.
With left hand do I twirl your short hair. And with right hand do I feel my pulse. The beats resound throughout my chest, and on my heartstrings do they dance.

I am ensconced in love. We two, passionate and lovingly, caress each other the best we can.
Oh! Are these not the heights of human nature? Was not mankind meant for this and only this?

Dearest delight, dazzling star,
Never change the way you are.
You whom nature has possessed—
Endowed with abundant bliss
And the sharpest wit.

This here is my dearest love. The one I love. Such things dreams are made of, which life contains, which existence sustains itself on, which faith rests upon, and hope thrives along.
There we are, beneath the heavens, loving in silent bliss. And in each other’s arms does time stop for a moment in which, as if real, we are frozen, never to be disturbed.

Oh! Such a wonder this all is. This feeling. This love.
This here is our fate! A romantic journey:
At first a prelude,
Then a crescendo of some repute,
Into a variation we did fly—
Skipping and singing all the way through—
Next the allegro soared so high,
Alas to the finale—oh so sublime!—
Which left nothing before in rebuke.

All this we did compose, and in each movement did we pluck at the chords of our inner harp.
Such delight those sounds did bring;
Dancing along the air, they did ring,
And in such mirth—together—we did sing!
In that moment, we clipped our past misery’s wings.

Forever after were we free, and we did love each other as best we could.
We did love! We did love! Never to forget, never to regret.
Come now, my dearest light,
Let us leap from the clouds back to Earth
And do it all again!

222.

To you I sing, oh dearest delight.
What words can describe this divine fright?
This frenzy which moves my soul and confuses my thoughts all over.
I have little peace of mind when not in the thought of you.

Oh you, you most precious jewel, stunning in all eyes. Whilst you twirl around, you cause heads to spin right ‘round. Look at that delicate smile, too; look how happy and content she is to merely be looked at by her love. This is a woman gifted indeed, endowed beyond all measure, for who compares to her when placed upon a golden scale? Such souls come but once in life, and with them do we lose all strife.

In her do I find my repose. With her do I wish to be. Only she and I. Ah, what a thought, such thoughts—what awe I feel at what we are. I can’t express enough this love I feel; and heavy is the weight of such delight. My heavenly sight, never be out of my eyes, lest these windows to the soul pour forth weighty tears because of you.

Oh, because of you, because of you—such hurt I feel when I love you. But what are we to do? What is our love but that, for now at least? Dearest, let not this temporary hurt be forever with us. Let us bypass such pain with deliberate strain, and see each other sometime.

Yes! Why don’t we see each other sometime? For now in dreams, but later by the rills, where the large boughs bend forward at our wills. That place where nature calls us forth, and we, like noble nymphs and fauns alike, go searching for fun and delight. We shall sing, and dance, and cheer, and be merry with each other, whilst nature is our witness. That is certainly on my wish list.

God, let not these thoughts be things of air; let me and my dearest share in all that fun—those things which our hearts run towards. Woe is me! Woe is me! For though I search within my mind for some internal peace, I do not find—and cannot find—that which encourages me.

Restless are the days and endless are the nights.
And though I try with all my mind
To overcome this dread, so nigh,
I find no peace within myself supplied—
All these things are vain, to no avail—without respite.

For many hours in the dead of night do I think upon you.
As I sit there alone within my room,
Veiled in darkness, drunk with love,
My mind forever turns around to you,
And, with no relief, I turn to things above.
But in those things above I find only my love.

Vanity, vanity, love is so much vanity.
In all these things I cannot see,
And with myself beset with such feelings,
I give myself away to my heart’s content,
And let the flood of tears I’d long held bent
Flow freely down this newly flushed face of mine.

Alas! My heart cannot take it. My soul cannot endure.
My soul yearns upwards in the dark of night,
Whilst my passions increase in the bright of day.
In raptures I am over you, and my heart cannot express that which is felt whilst I lay
In my lonely solitude.

Where is she now, that dearest sight?
Do not go so far, you dearest light,
For my heart burns deeply,
And my mind cannot withstand such blows of fright.

Where is she now, that heavenly light?
Do not venture too far into that great night,
For the dark disturbs me,
And my heart cannot take the distance which defies us.

But what is distance but a number on a line?
Should such a thing disturb our happy times?
Oh, happy times, happy times—happy is my heart with such delight.
I think of you and forget my daily plight,
And recall that all is good under the sun
So long as I can share the joy, and half the strife,
With that dear one who makes me feel alive again.

Blessed is her name,
For she puts all women to shame;
And who alive can hope to challenge her
Not only in beauty but in her grace?
None! For her face was not made for this world,
And what she is at heart soars far above the common lot.

In thought of her, no mere misfortune is too great.
I shall not shudder at what is to come,
For I know in the end we will be one.

223.

What sights ravish a man in merriment and happy times! All these great delights we do partake in. But how sad we feel when they are taken from us.

Oh, wretched time, do stay for a while, so that I may admire this great sight before me. Who else could it be but my dearest love?

Heavenly nature has forged her in the core of her heart, and out sprang from that tomb of bliss a thing which Venus did envy. Oh, and what physician could describe her bones? And what poet could describe her beauty?

I not only see her everywhere but feel her at all times. Such sublime sensations. The heights of joy know not what despair is to come with the setting of this most beautiful sun.

Oh time, do tarry a little, do stay somewhat longer. You don’t understand to what depths of sorrow I will be sent should the sight of my muse vanish from my eyes. Dearest angel who floats in heaven, in whose eyes I see the past and future alike, I don’t wish to be taken from your sight—not yet.

Lord, save me from such sorrow I will thus contend with when my dearest returns back from whence she came—some realm divine, fully supplied with all a mind could imbibe without intoxication.

Oh me, oh life—what sacrifice must I make for this woman? What must I do to possess her? What action must I take in order to be with her? Whom must I call upon? Whom can I trust but in myself?

Ah, but within me rests some doubt. Am I strong enough to overcome such fear—this fear which holds me back from seeing my dearest? Can I ever work up the courage?

I know in my heart what I must do, but whilst I know, my knowledge appears to me a mockery—for knowledge retreats at the approach of danger, and courage depletes when confronted by novelty.

Oh, endless delirium! Senseless verse spelled out without rhyme. Whatever! My dearest is sublime, and I WILL be worthy of her grace.

This fear is not to stop me forever. Not for me, for the sake of her. No! No! No! Not for me, all for her.

I am reborn in the thought of her, and from out of that foreboding mist do I appear to glow, rays reflecting off my dewy face, all in place, heart in a race—but such love can only be felt as such!

Yes! My love, my love. You leave me now but not forever. Never shall we be apart for so long as now. Once we meet and see the truth, the world will be in some new light—some light derived from divine radiance; a face which has shone with the truth, which puts all darkness to flight, and which abounds in love.

Ah yes, love, that is what we are both after, my dearest heavenly delight. I love you!!!

224.

In the darkness I now lay. In tears I am thinking upon my beloved. About all the things we have said and exchanged, all those fine gestures and caring notions.

And now—oh!—woe is me! Such commotion I feel within my heart. My dearest has now departed from me—not dead but from my sight—and the Lord did not provide me refuge in my grief. My frame, once powerful and lively, is now weakened and discouraged. Without her, I feel without my soul, I think without my mind, I see without my eyes.

To what do I owe the pleasure of encountering her? Perhaps my life? Perhaps, maybe, just maybe. I certainly feel that without her I would not be what I am today. How can a man ever repay his first love, his immortal beloved, the one he first felt feelings for—the first person to ever make him feel such a way?

This woman has ravished my heart, and now all that I see within this world appears a lot more beautiful—but also a lot more sad, for now I must contend with the fact that I will never again meet with such another sight. Oh, such a sight, such a sight! Who can live without such a sight? What am I to her? And what is she to me? Oh, dearest pain within my heart, like a gentle slash against my vital artery.

She would know how to make such an incision, too. She is a genius, a medical woman, a poet, a muse, a houri divine! Oh, in what way can I ever repay her—perhaps to claim her? To claim her? J—, you crazy fellow. But am I? Am I really? I am what I am, and I am in love. If I speak nonsense, then let nonsense reign, for this is all spoken from the heart, and from there does all my truth derive.

She is like the sweetest apple in the entire orchard, a flower whose grace floats upon the air, and with her near I will find myself able to bear all in this world. I want you, dearest—yes, you! Shall you have me too?

“Yours, if you’ll have me.”

And for you I will, I will. I feel in my heart I will. My brain tells another tale, but why listen? He only serves to distract me and lead me into darkness anyway. With my heart shall I fly to you, for it knows all and spurs me to action.

I will do what I must to have you.

Thy will be done,
On Earth as it is in heaven.

Amen!

225.

Oh, sweet muse, you come upon me in my fits of blues. Like music, at once do you restore my mind and help me to recall those things which are divine.

Under heaven do we recline, and in repose do we find what we both sought within each other. Your hair, so fine, blows in the wind whilst I stroke your gentle cheek and caress your chin. Dearest love, leave not my sight again. I was lost without you. In the dark did I roam and found naught but misery and scorn—all foam upon the sea, meaningless and vain.

In your heart do I wish to be. I want only my happiness to be shared with thee. I hate all things which distract us from each other. I want to stare within your eyes and catch a glimpse of your soul. When I speak of you, let me do so only as a poet. Let my verse resound with spectacular sound; let it ring across the globe for all to hear and fold their arms, too, whilst they look up at the high heavens and hear the voice of love speaking through.

Praise be upon you, you dearest creature, you. What would I be without you? Merely a man, but nothing more. A man who knows not love knows not life, for this is surely the stuff life is made of. I want to weave for you a blanket of bliss, so that when I see you I may wrap you in it, to keep you warm with my flame, and kindle the passion with desire and intrigue.

Oh, to be in love. What does this sensation not bring a mind to? I have a mind for a thing or two, but this feeling is beyond all conception. What men do for love—how low we stoop to obtain it! How easily we are played the fool. How hard it is to find a truly noble woman: one of focus, conviction, intelligence, beauty, strength, integrity, and above all, love. Who possesses all these? Who is well-endowed enough to become a companion unto man? Who is so formed by God so as to find another equally well-formed and constituted?

Oh, how rare these aspects are! Hard to find and hard to obtain; hard to mold and hard to change; hard to remain and hard to keep; hard to be and hard to sleep—when we lack all these qualities. The things I’d do for love! To what extent would I go to craft myself into a man worthy of it? Ah, senseless ambition, vicious drive—I’m compelled to become something for my own decline.

Alas, things are not as bad as they seem. My dearest is a heavenly light, and we seemingly struck gold whilst digging in the night. To such confabulations did we fly—so many words conveyed after that blessed exchange of the “sanctuarious quiet of this idle mind.” Oh me, oh my, my dearest is the loveliest thing in my mind—the apple of my eye; the most precious thing this world contains, and the most holy thing among the profane.

This woman is beyond words, in fact, for she is divine—and besides, she knows much more than I and returns all I say to her as much more sublime. Urdu, Punjabi, and English she can boast, whilst I must make do with the worst of the worst—a hackneyed English drawn from the dross of Brooklyn, New York. My accent is clear, my voice baritone, quite dissonant, and, like Moses, I carry with me a distinct hesitation of speech. Let not my voice, however, disturb the honey which springs forth from my pen. Is it not true, dearest, that whilst I have no oratory, you would think me a second Aaron were you to read my written word?

My tongue has always cleaved to my mouth, but my mind is free to speak all things out. Hence I write these lines to you as I do, freely and with such love I cannot comprehend whence it comes and where it goes. All thoughts are like the petals on a withered rose: they come and grow, but with time pass away shriveled and dead, to grace the Earth before they’re repurposed again. Such is the nature of all ideas; they come and go as they please and heed not all our cries and pleas to keep them still. We cannot say, “Stay, for thou art so fair,” for the instant we do, they blush and disappear in a beautiful glare.

You see, dearest, how I rhyme so casually and coolly as of now? I attribute this to nothing more than a good ear and a little patience. A man cannot write as he will, but as inspiration fulfills. In the approaching moments of our silence, we are greeted by imagery and poetic fancy—once these are found, grasp them as best you can and never let them out of your hand; they come by chance and need—every now and then—to be impaled with a lance if they’re to stay put within our soul.

All poetry is but imagery made manifest in feeling. It matters not whether it rhymes or rings, sings or brings silence still: so long as the heart composes and the hand disposes, the lines will have their sense, and the reader will get the meaning from that point thence. (You see what I did there in that last line? Pretty brilliant, right?)

Besides dearest, you know as well as I that when I write to you I cannot help but put on my best performance, for how could I disappoint my companion? No! I cannot think of such a thing. I would rather fade away than write to my love in such a way that disappoints. I have too high an opinion of her intelligence, and respect her time too much, to present to her triteness. But enough of this poetic propaedeutic.

In awe I am of this divinity I see before my sight. Could a man such as me behold such a figure and not go blind at the sight? I scarce thought it possible for such a thing to even exist. For long did I dwell in the darkness of the night, but now, having seen your heavenly sight, my eyes are clear, and I have seen truth for the first time.

What a divine thing. Such love I feel.

226.

How fair and how pleasant you are, oh love, for delights! Such delights we do partake in as we take flight from all the troubles of this world. One day and then the next come upon us with unrelenting force, and we must gird up our loins to face the trouble ahead, lest we be swallowed up by forces that hate love.

This world is not meant for our happiness but for our endurance and patience. Whilst we labor, another thousand concerns spring up, and we, having no time, must make do with what we have. What we have is each other, and that is enough for us. We must remain strong whilst we are together; otherwise, that “forever” will become a forgotten memory. Let not our past fade before our loving eyes; to oblivion it shall go, but in love it shall arise.

Love conquers all, and with it we shall have a light by which to navigate the fright that is daily life. In deep darkness do we dwell, black and obscene like a terrible night, but with truth around we shall spell our way out in words and fight the greatest of fights in this world.

The knowledge of man gives him much sense, but little wisdom. Wisdom finds itself only in the company of love and does not know itself unless it has experienced what true love is. Such are the joys of a sound mind: infinite are the delights and few are the pains that come as a result of experience well-reasoned through.

Man must reflect on what he is if he’s to understand what he wants. Whilst we go out into the unknown, we must always attach a lantern to ourselves by which to see through the foreboding ignorance of this world. A flame reveals many things so long as it is lit. Let the winds catch a fit and snuff it out forever after—in darkness shall we stumble, and in darkness shall we suffer.

But enough ink has blotted the pages of many manuscripts on such a theme. Allow me a happy variation by which to vent all this pent-up ecstasy.

Such delights do I see, and such heavenly eyes do gaze back at me. Oh, this woman is like the Vestal Virgin flame, forever lit and always shining bright—in her light do we see the world unfurled before our sight. What beauty does charm the soul; your noble chap can hardly control himself with so much that is tempting before him. My eyes feast upon your figure, and my mind is compelled to increase—a passion kindled with great care, all while the cinders fly here, there, and everywhere.

Watch over it with patience, and let not the passion be abated by the elements of fate or chance. Watch it! Watch it! Watch over it until it blazes, and then step back and watch the beautiful array of flames as they consume the surrounding pavement. Oh, my dearest, dearest light; in you I find hope, in you I find life. I am reborn by the sight of you, and even though you be far from me and I from you, I still have an eye for you—a heart that burns in lust for you—and wants only for the world to be consumed by our passionate blazes, like a box full of matches lit aflame by divine ignition.

Dearest creature who art in heaven, return to me in all your resplendence. I behold you in the flesh, but not for long, for the moment I embrace you, you’re gone without a trace; like a candle in the midst of a wind which blows across the whole globe, snuffing out all light and casting us back into that night of the world—dark like a tombstone in a new moon, as grave as death itself, as foreboding as a coffin in the cold. Everything tenebrous comes out, and only the gloom of a phantom reveals itself within so much darkness. What else would show?

Alas, dearest, near you, none of this occurs. Your presence alone ignites the world and turns this rock to a burning coal whose white glow burns up everything like some ancient furnace kept lit from without, whose sparks fly upwards though nothing is in it to show. A cinder of divine love, you are born from the source itself, and everything you do is made lovely by the slightest touch.

Who is she? Who is that divine glow who burns with a modest gaze and gorgeous eyes? Oh, it’s my dearest divine. Why am I not surprised? This heavenly muse is so ideal I could praise her till I lose my sense as a poet altogether and merely become a rhapsodist, an oracle, a prophet, a troubadour—or perhaps a lutenist—who sings only when the moment strikes.

Let it strike soon. Let it strike now! For my heart abounds with heavy feelings and much desire; and I want only to sing psalms to her who inspires.

Ah, my dearest delight—how much I’ve said, how much I’ve meant. Do you think it will ever end? I hope to God it doesn’t, for I want eternity only between you and me. Yea, where the confabulation is always pleasant and we never tire of the things we say. That would be the greatest joy for me.

227.

The night is old and the day arises, but whilst I sit here sleepless and tired, I cannot help but feel inspired. The songs have sung, the bells have rung, and all that could have been said regarding my dearest love has perhaps been said.

But has it? How can one ever fully praise their immortal beloved—that eternal love, that flame which is forever lit, and which kindles new desires each time its glint passes before our eyes? Only near you do I feel myself anew, and yet, we are so far, so long-distant, that not even our loudest shouts travel the distance. But the distance never really mattered.

I am in awe of what we are, what we have—this special connection, this match in heaven. Romeo and Juliet, perhaps? R— and J—, is it not?!—where these star-crossed lovers are fated to either forever be apart or embrace each other in one unity under the sun. With the heavens as my witness, with nature as my spirit, with my mind as my reason, and with my heart as my guide—let me never go astray whilst I try to shorten this distance.

Oh life, I call upon you not to be so blue and to remain strong for your dearest who, all this time, has been working real hard, studying the secrets of medicine, uncovering the human heart as it actually beats. Is she not the most heavenly thing alive, J—? I find in her all that life could afford, which is to say everything. She is priceless, for she has principles rare in a woman from the strange land you’re from. Halfway across the world she may be, but raised in fruitful soil, she sprouts like some pretty flower, never to wither and always to blow beautifully hither and thither in the gentle breeze of life.

I can’t get enough of this woman’s sight. Her strong features—that face, so beautiful!—with her short hair and swarthy complexion, like some delicate sand bathing in the sun. She has some fire to her, some real dedication, some real intelligence, some real wit—perhaps even genius! Oh yes! She’s a genius alright. In my mind, she has taste and culture enough to last a thousand lifetimes. What other woman is like her? What girl today could match this one here? Is there any such one? Is that even a fair question to ask? I feel like comparing her to anyone else is folly, for she is a golden bowl which contains all the silver apples. She exalts those near her through her presence alone. What power! What force!

I’m still in awe! Will you never not be in awe of her, J—? No! She will always surprise me, for she seems not of this world but from another. Whilst I was in the night of the world, wandering aimlessly, she broke out upon the sky in the birth of dawn and revealed her glorious light; through her light was I able to see the path before me, and in her light did I find myself restored again, refreshed even. Like water to a thirsty man, her light was to me; always with glee will I remember that first chance encounter, and forever after will I strive to follow in the light which she has shown me.

Me, J—, her idle rambler, her poet, her friend, her companion, her dearest, her ardent admirer, etc.
Her, R—, my love, my life, my light, my heavenly delight.

Together shall we be? I test not the patience of fate, but if I must, I will bring Earth to heaven in order to make this dream become reality. No distance is too far, no barrier is too wide, no obstruction is too great not to be broken through by me. I’ve already decided: for you, my dearest, all options are on the table. I shall not test fate, but I dare her to throw something in my way—just to see how fast I dispatch it.

Oh! Are these poems not the clearest sign of my desire? Though scanty cantos, they have a lot of feeling behind them. To the Song of Solomon did I compose them, and to my dearest R did I intend them. In these raptures did I intend to praise, and in my design did I seek to delight.

So tell me now, dearest R, did you like them? Did they give you a sense of where my heart is for you? Did they not kindle in you a similar longing? If they have done any of these, I have succeeded. I know no better way to end these raptures than in the most poetic phrase I know:

I love you!

Yours, if you’ll have me,

J—

228.

On weighty things I planned to write,
But my soul offered me no repose
By which my heart could be made glad
At the joys of Earth.

Lord, know that I have sinned
But have confessed my sins to You;
In You do I seek my salvation,
And through You do I seek my eternal life.

If my life were but a dream,
None of this would matter to me.
Alas, because I live I suffer,
And for Your sake do I endure.

My racing heart and aching brain give me more thoughts than I can fathom;
I have few outlets, and all these pass by my eyes wearily.
The trees, however, speak a different tale.
In their green am I restored,
And through their leaves do I abhor
All that is not within me.
Such is the power of the Lord:
In grief and joy do we fly to Him.

229.

On this sunny day I do relay
My thoughts to God with great dismay.
How vain my powers, how few my hopes;
How wretched my life, how empty my lot.

No one but God hears these weary cries.
I am a stranger wandering all along the Earth.
Great deeds I conceive whilst walking among the trees,
But sadly sense that those deeds, too, are vain.
Were I to write, nothing but vanity would come forth.

Who would be there to greet me on my sorrowful way?
Who among the living knows my pain?
Nay, only the dead have freedom from this life;
And in that are they the happiest to have been.

230.

Like the dust lifted up to the air by a violent force,
So too shall I come down and fade away.
All things of Earth are vain and short,
And leave all in the end to little hope.
I, too, once had a dream of hope,
Whose scope was vast
And which gleamed with love;
But sights of this life have put me off,
Never to return to that hopeful bend;
Always to remain among feckless men,
And thankless crowds and worthless joys,
Whose stay is all too short,
And makes the man who cares opine
On things he feels but knows not why.

231.

Were I to say what I truly think, oh Lord, I would be unable to speak.
My tongue would cling to my mouth, and my thoughts would be ignorant of their sense.
I am weary as I walk this Earth.
This world which I inhabit in my soul,
And within it do I find a certain hell,
From which I can’t escape—
The least of all my troubles being this.

Oh Lord, why dost Thou leave me dumb and mute!
Struck me dead You did with sense;
So much wisdom I do possess,
Thanks to Your bountiful hand,
But I still pass through this world a stupid man.
All of knowledge ends in vanity,
And those who move unto her
Find she recedes at the approach of her wooer:
Never to be defiled by man is she,
Forever to be the thing
To which we men of learning cling.
Oh! What pain and misery this brings
We men of learning who unto her do sing;
In all our praises and all our cries,
Do we remain a shame to her on high.

232.

Infinite are the pains and wretched are the plights.
We jest in mirth but lose the sight
Of our great death which comes like night.
In fright are we at the thought of death,
But I, loving God, lose not the inborn hope—
The eternal inward stride—
Which is to me my greatest pride,
And to eternal life do I elope.

Though we regret we come into this world,
We leave in hope, with strong-held faith,
That God will provide our eternal place.

We wear a coat of fright as we traverse this foreign land,
And find ourselves among the dead who wave to us with feeble hand.
Unsure, we travel round in hopes of some fine view,
But whilst we twist and turn and move we find little new.
So be it! All the same in every way.
From dust to dust and ash to ash do we all go and shall remain.

233.

This is what life is made for, I feel:
A fresh breeze, a tranquil mind, a sunny day, and an honest heart.

In wisdom do we seek the world,
And few obtain her full grandeur;
But those who strive to know her in full
Are never not dissatisfied.

Our stay is short, and all our hopes ignored—
Whilst we live and put off what we wish—
Yet find, we do, some firm foundation sound:
The word of God, the power and awe,
To leave us right and curse the greatness that we found.
Eternal fire, holy bliss!
May we not, with You, go amiss.

234.

Father that is holy, give me the strength
To speak with confidence on that which
I love: Wisdom! Holy art Thou,
And blessed is Your name.
Shall I find favor with You,
I would want for nothing at all,
And be content for all my life with You alone.

Were my powers great enough to be
At my command at all times,
I would surely write till the days grow old;
Until nothing was left to be said by me.
Can anyone say what they wish, however?
I scarce think the truth of all things possible;
Nowhere am I met with more discouragement
Than in my own mind when I try to say
The things I feel, but which I fail to do
Justice to, with the whole of truth in view.

Alas, dearest Wisdom, leave me not.
Come to me, and I to you, and we two
Shall think upon our views and come to muse
On all the things in Earth and heaven.
Such fun we’d have, and run under the sun
We would, until, tired and breathless,
We embrace as one for truth’s sake—and love’s too!

235.

Leave not my sight, you fairest beauty.
In you do I wish to be one, and one forever.
I have sought you far and wide,
Have traversed hills and mountainsides,
And in the end found but a light so bright
That my eyes could not perceive what they saw.
It was wisdom’s call that led me on, and now
Before her I stood shocked and mute;
No words did leave my lips, and much
fear and trembling was put into my soul.

All things go the way of death,
But what wisdom sees she keeps alive.
There is much to be sought within
The confines of this weary world,
Though most would think otherwise
For its appalling aspect—vain and debased as it is;
Where man competes with man:
Father against son,
Mother against daughter,
Sister against brother, and
Friend against friend—
From friend to foe do we turn against each other.
I still, however, wish to keep the peace
And stop the war in which we fight needlessly.

Of all things in life, wisdom is most precious.
She sends her gifts down from heaven, most luscious,
And in them do we find what is the most sublime in life:
That its shortness is not a thing of rebuke, but proof
That time itself is a very precious thing.
Love whilst you have it.
That is all wisdom in sum.

236.

My melancholy has been a dear companion all my life.
To her I did fly in times of grief, and in joy thought of her.
Never was I without her shadow, and always will I be followed by her.

Without doubt my life has been an endless misfortune punctuated
By periods of bliss profound and indescribable by any language or expression.
I saw within myself a darkness so profound, light itself was laughed at by me.
I ventured deep into the night, and emerged clothed in a veil of black
Almost unnatural in its blackness—all light seems to flee at its approach;
All things in this world seem to fade away the nearer I get to them.

Thought deeply downtrodden, labored out of dirt and muck,
For the sake of being cleaned by my thought,
And overcome by my experience.
Within myself did I have the confidence to say all thus far;
All which I will say in the future, relating to the past,
To be repeated by me in the present to my own dismay—
All this I am not equal to, and will fail to produce anything
Worthy of everlasting inscription in the book of time:

Perchance the Book of the Dead will have my name,
But should the Lord forget me, I am as good as dead anyway.
Love not death, but the process of dying.
Such temporality and finiteness we must enjoy whilst living.

237.

I know all too well the way the world is going:
To death, decay, and destruction.
No man knows the heavens, and no man his time;
No man knows himself, and confused he is of the divine.

The regularity with which we toss ourselves at the behest
Of this cruel, barbaric world is quite unsettling to timid souls.
This world, so fast and bent on its own annihilation,
Will find, perhaps, great beauty in what it seeks to destroy.

To destroy the self was once a sacrificial act:
The Hindus of old would toss themselves to crocodiles in the Ganges,
Or place themselves within holy tanks of water to drown in the temples,
Or cast themselves beneath the wheels of the cart of Jagannath.

This is to say nothing of the West’s worship of death—
Of a man who became a sacrificial offering,
And who rose from the dead, supposedly.

The corruption of all things has been taken very far,
And at this rate will overtake all that we’ve come to achieve—
Perhaps regress things even, in order to make the world even worse than it is.

Modernity is a child of corruption.
In its seed lies the potential for chaos,
A force so powerful no order could bring it under duress.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity:
This world and all things in it.

238.

Where has the time gone, and all my happiness?
From the world did I try to relieve myself, never to find any relief.
I, at last, must accept the fact that I live, and must endure others for my sake.
My nature is too caring to really be of use to anyone more practical than me.
I only serve the moral end of my nature, and those who do not see it can never understand me.

My preoccupation with life—a task indomitable and relentless—
Has been to me a very vexing thing; I get no relief, and less than joy: misery!
All my woes are shouted in the dark; my words but vain imagery, cast forward in breath only to remain air.

My sense is not my own.
The day is overcast and gray once again,
And I am with myself, alone.
A string quartet plays whilst I write this out,
And I am lost in my thoughts, alone, again.

239.

All thoughts on life speak the same truth:
In the end, all is up with us, and what we do now matters little.
We shall live in the face of this daunting reality, however,
For it is better to be bold in the face of death than timid before life itself.

This one reality speaks of many things—all vain!—but speaks with sense nonetheless,
In a language not unknown, but which is hard to interpret.
Life speaks to us in parables, and we, like children, try to interpret the paradoxes as if they had meaning.
The beginning of all speculative thought is in the confusion one suffers on account of life.

How memorable our first sadness is, and how painful is its recollection.
Forever after are we affected, and yet must move through the world with its knowledge ever upon us.
So uncaring and unconcerned are most people with respect to their lives.
All things are passed on as if mere foam upon the sea, wind within the air, space between a void.

Vanity does the thought appear.
Oh! How I hate uncertainty.
How I hate all the false gods and prophets of this world—
People who live for themselves and who have no desire outside of comfort.

Must a poet like me forever be confronted only by misery?
Nay, there’s love and beauty enough within the trees to satisfy a whole lifetime.
It is I who am to blame for all my wretchedness—which has seemingly been the conclusion all wise men come to in the end:

Life is forever to be misunderstood, little happiness is to be achieved, and only in the love of others—and the fear of God!—does one find hope enough to live.

240.

As the clouds begin to part and the blue of day shines through,
I recall to mind the happy thought that I am alive.
Blessed is this life, this day, and the Lord who hath made both.
Only in God do I find my salvation. In meditation on Him am I made whole.
Oh! Holy is He that turns the stars and lifts the clouds up to the sky.

I am inspired by His word, and in the speaking of it partake of His breath.
In me is breathed the breath of life, and from that source also stems my wisdom of Him.
Forever must I be in submission to the Lord.
Holy is the King of kings, Lord of lords, Father of all fathers.

None who do evil shall know His grace, nor have His favor; they shall be cast like a pebble upon the ground from a falling boulder—
A large stone which shall crash upon the wicked and grind them to dust.
Only in my mind do I wish to be with God.
In my heart, Him and Him alone.

Without God, no wisdom shall be within me,
And I would go my reckless way uncertainly.
Serene is the man who knows God but not why he does.
Only in faith shall all be delivered to him by Him in heaven.

He who reigns as King in the land of the most holy beings;
There my life shall be, in Him, and I shall have my happiness eternal.
Amen to that, and praise the Lord.
From my mouth to God’s ears, may all this come to pass.

241.

Thoughts come to man as naturally as breathing, but not thinking.
Serious reflection is a lost art, and so few know its craft that they think themselves wise merely by saying foolish things.

Oh Lord, give me wisdom enough to see through the vanity of this world;
Give me the strength to endure all the tribulations I must face as I pass through the fire of life—
Of becoming an adult, which today means nothing more than a handmaid to capital—
And on account of all my overcomings, may I please You, and in the interim do Your works faithfully.

I want my faith to always be in You, oh Lord!
Allow Your wretched, weak, wicked servant to perform his tasks with the might of God behind him.
If I can live to exalt the good, spread the Word, help the needy, and uplift mankind overall—all whilst praising You, oh Lord—I shall be the happiest man in Christendom.

The trees sway within the wind, and in such a sight do I see Your reflection.
Oh, blessed little leaf, hang on to your branch with faith; for like me, you are attached to a mighty oak whom no wind shall ever uproot.

My faith in God is just the same: I am like that little leaf attached by a branch called faith—which waves in the winds of adversity and the strife of life—but which is itself attached to a great trunk called God, upon whom all subsist, and whom all praise whether they know it or not.

God is the root by which all neighboring soil is refreshed and enlivened.
Through Him is the ground made dear to those who walk upon her, and under our feet lie divinities untold and unseen since the dawn of time, perhaps.

Ah, that there is the greatest mystery, and the greatest work of God. Even when veiled, we still see His outline, and are comforted by the appearance, though it be an apparition.

242.

Will I ever say all I truly wish to say about life?
Did Shakespeare manage to exhaust his own heart through his pen?
Did Dante say all he could have regarding his blessed Beatrice?
Do I have the power within me to ever meet my dearest R—?

Oh, so many thoughts, so little time.
I scarcely think I have the mind
Capable of understanding all which I put upon it.
I have done my best to seek wisdom faithfully,
Looking everywhere I could, within all times and cultures,
In order to extract only that which was the purest good from all;

In everything, by the end of it, I found, to my dismay, that Solomon would win out again—proving every youthful spirit wrong by showing them the vanity of life.
An ode to life toward which every soul yearns upwards, but which reality casts back downwards.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Such vexation of spirit this all is.

And yet, why has God made me so wise?
“I believe in God. In His will.”
Ah! The ultimate answer to which all men come when the Reason He gave us fails to comprehend His works.

Man shall always be in the dark with respect to what he wants out of life,
And that is, perhaps, why I can never rid myself of the urge to write.
So long as I live, the things I see with my own eyes will cause me to cry either out of joy or despair.
Which one is better I know not: for joy is like a rising star that must soon fall before our eyes; and despair is like a boulder which we’re pinned under, but only because we refuse to use our faith as the fulcrum to move the load.

With faith—even as small as a mustard seed—”we shall move mountains,” says our Lord and Savior.
In this is, without doubt in my mind, the truest and most lasting wisdom there will ever be.

Forever whilst we live will we be denied the dearest desires of our heart.
Though nothing is more pleasing to the soul than to have our every desire fulfilled,
We are forced to walk the ground carrying a heart with a hole within it—
A hole which no amount of love, or passion, or sensual satisfaction could ever fill.

In that void rests the eternal yearning, the soul which strives upwards and comes back down to repose in the home of all human happiness and sadness: the heart!
Only in God do we feel that hole no more.
In His eternal love alone can we feel completely satisfied and happy in life.
Without Him, His power, His authority, His strength—forever to the page must we writers turn when out of faith.

243.

In my chair do I sit, and move not from it;
All day writing out what I feel, and why I feel.
To such heights I do go in this exercise.
Always writing, hardly living, lest life be thought of only in thought.
Should we feel that is the case, we shall have lived more than anyone else.

I have traveled as far as I could in the realm of thought, and have read many profound thoughts relating to the soul, nature, man, God, and the purpose of all our ambitions.
In all of it, I cannot say I profited much.
Only in my abilities to write, think, and feel have I increased,
But I am still very much a lost man, confused when faced with questions which words alone cannot answer.

My thoughts span the whole domain of man, yet I seek God, and want only God, for in God do I know I am saved, and have any hope of enduring this life.
Lord, give me the strength to find life within my life, in order that I may live for the sake of my life, rather than forever reflecting upon why I have not lived and foolishly calling that a kind of life.

I have still yet to truly affirm life, but that, I feel, is coming to an end very soon.
My heart already knows this to be the case, and my mind fully comprehends the many difficulties that will ensue.
Despite all this, I am not deterred, for again, I have God with me, and in Him do I feel above all which this world may throw at me.

I am secure in His love, and I am able to live through His love of me.
I saw the Lord, and He opened my eyes to many sweet and wondrous things:
I know I cannot be wrong in my faith in Him, for I have heard, I have seen, and I have felt—all due to Him.

244.

Too quickly does the time seem to pass,
And afterwards do I find I missed out
On a portion of life
Not insignificant to me.

Life is a dream,
And all we do
And all we seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
One long illusion cast like a shadow into a darkness unseen.
We wearily move past the dark groves of our past,
Seeing the fate of our span and where we are to go.

Our fathers find their graves in our short memories,
And sadly remind us how we’re to be buried in our survivors.
Past the tombstone of the world I see an elegy writ:
“Forever we thought we’d be, till death took our sight to see.”

So goes the way of all things, to dust made familiar with the dirt,
Which shall lie forth as new soil for future kin to walk upon.
Oh! How lamentable our lives may be,
Should we reflect on them too realistically.

The tragedy of our lives is that we live at all:
Facing things we’d rather not,
Enduring things we long to forget,
Doing things at times we hate,
And always forcing ourselves to be fake.

This is our modern narrative:
Material,
Practical,
Boring,
Dulling,
Lifeless,
Godless,
Routine, and
Rigidly structured.

Shall the manacle which chains our necks and binds our feet
Ever be shattered by the outcry of those who will to live a different path?
So far as I know, it doesn’t seem possible for man to rise above his age
Without enduring suffering and pain unthinkable to those who know not wild ambition.

I’m so ambitious to be everything this age is not,
That I would die for its sake if it meant I could find
Some peace within my restless heart; which everything
At present moves so violently against that the task of
Becoming myself is an occupation unto itself.

I am resolved, however, to go through with what I must—
And if I’m fated to be just another Kierkegaard or Thoreau, then so be it.
God wills all things in the end, whether He be or not,
And so in faith do I cling to Him, and endure myself for myself’s sake.

That is life.

245.

Our works never prove equal to our conceptions.
Everything man does is idealized in some form.
Fearing the end, man attempts to become immortal through some work he had a hand in making.
The knell of death rings loudly throughout the world,
And all who live hear it with fear in their hearts,
And when asked to explain why they fear,
With trembling tongues do they say that death approaches all soon enough.

All lives are just a prolonged death.
Better it will always be to have not been, rather than to have been.
Suffering makes the world too much to handle;
Reality is too much with us, and every vain affair ends in pain,
Or results in a then-unforeseen annoyance which, were we privy to it, we would never have undertaken in the first place.

The world presses us down into the dust in order that we may constantly be reminded of where all our ambitions lead.
So long as one lives, one must forever feel a sense of uncertainty about where one is going, what one wishes one were doing, and how one has made so many mistakes along the way.

Man is in a constant battle against forces which he cannot control, yet which he must be subject to in order to live:
Forces which only serve to make his life difficult and dull, repressing his fiery ambition and chilling his every noble impulse.
To be ourselves today is the task, yet to conform for the sake of life is our duty.

The main contradiction of life—as is laid out clearly enough—will forever be pushed through by man’s ambition, all in order for it to recoil back to him.
Man will strive hard in every direction and find in the end he has hardly moved at all.

For freedom does he fight and strain,
But in the end dies alone in the grave.
He drained his blood for the sake of his life,
And found it gave him nothing more than strife.

Such is life! Such is life!
Woe to those with hopes beyond their powers.
I pray they find their way among peaceful flowers,
And hope God helps them should they go astray in miserable hours.

Amen!

246.

We live in time yet feel behind it.
All things come and go, to and fro, but end the same.
The melody which plays in the background of our life
Is like one strung from a harp forged in hell,
Where all miserable sounds serenade our ears painfully.

Mankind is a special thing only so far as we tell ourselves that.
Such narratives hold no interest for me.
I’m still figuring out why I exist at all.
This whole circuitous route which the compass of our life traces out
Is one which only the architect of nature could figure out.
In Him are we saved, and in Him do we find peace above all.

The world is always striving to push us in one direction over the other;
Socialization and material conditions—the primum mobile of modernity—
set the limit of what we can think and do;
And in that do we come to view
The whole of life as merely a process to live through,
Rather than to become within.

Eternal are the strivings, plenty are the pains,
Many the annoyances, endless the regrets.
Oh life, will I never cease my weariness of you?
When will I at last be free of you?

Is such a thought for one so young not the sign of a deeply depressed man?
Maybe my solitude is to blame, or my love of wisdom, or my love for things which offer me no livelihood, or maybe my upbringing as well.
All these and a little more, no doubt, have conspired against me to make me a perfectly happy, though stern, individual on the outside, but a deeply introspective and worried man on the inside.

My suffering is like a sickness unto life, which culls the joy of every genial passion and makes me regret having experienced all the happiness I have thus far.
I don’t know anymore. I’m at a loss for words, and yet, my loss of words is exactly what causes me to say and think more than I do.

If only I knew all things without worry. If only I had the wisdom of God put in me forever. Then, I might be bold enough to actually venture into the world—rather than constantly trying to overcome it by outsmarting what reason alone cannot comprehend within it.
It is in action alone that we push through the uncertainty of life; yet we always act in life in fear of what may come up—what will grind us to dust beneath its overwhelming force, which we had no knowledge of before it was too late.

Alas! Cursed life we are forced to live. Always unsure, always in doubt, always in fear and trembling with respect to everything.
God’s presence is not near me in such reflections, and I sometimes wish myself unable to feel at all, in order to rid myself of so much indomitable despair.

Existential regret has been my life; and all my thoughts concerning life have only ever felt like distractions from living. Let that be every intellectual’s lament—for in that last sentence, I spoke for all of us.

I love my idle thoughts more than I do the opinions of the world. I love that I can relish the time I waste within them selfishly, as if the world didn’t exist; yet it is the world itself that is the cause of all that I think and feel. Such vexing contradictions this all is.

Only in my temptations does God heed me. Only when I feel like doing something to go astray does He give me the boldness and confidence to act at all.
Why, God? Why me? Why do You lift me up one moment only to cast me back down in the next? You tempt me viciously like You did Job. I believe it is Your intention, in fact, to test me in this life—to test how much misery I can endure—in order to see the extent of my faith in You.

Hear me then—oh Lord!—for I will speak from the heart on what You feel like to me presently: only in my temptations do I feel You, but never in my remorse.
Alas! Thy will be done! On Earth as it is in heaven.

Give me courage to act, oh Lord, and give me wisdom to know, oh Lord. With these two things within me, oh Lord, there is no challenge in life which I couldn’t live up to and surpass with ease.
Oh Lord! Grant me these things, and I will beautify Your creation with all my genius, and act as a light to the world—to uplift those ignorant of Your ways and message.

This world shall know love, and I will help lift the veil from man’s eyes in order to show him the true splendor that resides beneath all its shallow, surface-level misery and materialism.
There is more to this world than those things, and with Your help, oh Lord, I will reveal the spiritual to man—the hidden depths of his love, found in You!

Let me live, oh Lord, and I will become a light to this world!

247.

Wisdom is the sweetest morsel ever cooked up by man.

The world may find a dearth of wisdom at present,

But those who seek her faithfully have an abundance at their hands.

Wisdom has always been a thing which people praise but few obtain.

Woe to those who fall short of her, for in her do we obtain the necessary sense to move among the wicked, to overcome sin, and to perform what is needed for ourselves.

In wisdom do all things shine with a blinding aspect.

We see through her lens for the first time, and forever after are our eyes frozen in golden rays.

The world suddenly opens to us when our judgments are sharp and our intentions are good.

Wisdom informs all things how they are to go, and how man is to move if he wishes to endure the world peacefully.

This world knows no reason strong enough to make it rational as a whole; but through wisdom do we approach the objective of all wise men:

To open the eyes of the masses to what lies above them—God the Father!

Fear of Him is the beginning of wisdom, for through Him does all wisdom flow; and those who heed their own understanding only are lost to Him forever, for in their conceit do they place themselves above nature—which no one can ever be—and in doing so think themselves like God, when they are really ignorant of Him and only mock Him in their ignorance.

248.

Forever must we feel behind what we are called to do.
Life presents us with more tasks than we are willing to do,
And the more we strive to complete them, the larger their burden becomes to us.
Always are we fighting time, stress, the thought of death, and all other things which seek to destroy our hope.

What meaning is there in this world without God? What wisdom is there but faith in God—to be in fear and trembling of Him, not because He is vicious, but because He is merciful?
He knows all things and has seen our sins as we have committed them. Nothing is without His notice, and no man is wise enough to outsmart the Lord.
Fear the Lord, cling unto Him like a child does its mother, and never lose faith in Him; for without faith there is no hope, and once hope is lost, all is up with man.

So long as we live, we must have God before our minds.
The longer we stray from God’s way, the more our life descends into disarray.
There will always be those who feel in sync with their moral nature enough to pose as wise men, but they are deceivers. In truth, no wise man exists on Earth—there are only those who fear and those who fear not the Lord.

In Him do all things come, and through Him all things go.
Under His eye, all is seen, nothing missed, and all rightly judged.
We are always in the wrong with respect to God; not because we have done wrong, but because we are conceited enough to believe our ways have not been wicked.
No action by man is equal to those which God has commanded; and only the humble shall be viewed favorably in heaven, for they follow His commands and do not wish to stray from His way as given in the Law, the Prophets, and ancient wisdom.

249.

Every piece of wisdom is really a reminder of something we already know.
Without knowledge there can be no wisdom; and knowledge is a fickle thing, for it can only be obtained after hard experience or difficult reasoning, both of which are intolerable to the slothful and ignorant alike.

Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the master’s grain. Likewise should we be with the young who are ambitious for wisdom, but who know the perils that come with obtaining a little of it.
A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep of the sapiential spring or not at all—lest you find yourself crashed upon the crags of life, overturned and disarmed by life, fending for yourself with nothing but your own brain and a weak faith.

In God do we find our hope, our wisdom, and our eternal life. Those who know not the glories of these things should hear the words of those who do, lest they, in their ignorance, forever go blindly through the world and potentially lose themselves by losing faith.
Ignorance of God’s word is ignorance of life, for in God do we find wisdom for life, without which nothing can ever make sense to us who see but partially all things which confront us in this world.

A man is always playing a trick on himself when he says, with total conviction, that God fails to answer him. “Who are you to command God?” I would say. God does all things, but they are a mystery to man.
The longer a man strains himself in attempting to understand God with his reason, the more he will lose sight of His reason—and thus turn his faith into a kind of reason, until his faith is rationalized away completely and he becomes nothing more than an intellectually honest but, in the end, foolish atheist.

250.

The grandeur of life is never far from my heart. It is only things outside my heart that make me despair of life.

I am never without fear and trembling, either. The “sickness unto death” is not a worry of mine, for I know my faith in the Lord is strong, and that I do His works with His favor at heart. The Lord sustains me and always makes my heart loving towards life. I cannot hate life, no matter how miserable, so long as the Lord’s love endures within me.

Through faith am I saved, and in life do I live in faith, in order that the Lord may always be at my right hand—to save me from myself should life become too much to bear in a single instance. All things come to dust, but not when the Lord is considered.

Faith is the most powerful aspect of wisdom, for faith is really nothing more than a recognition of one’s own fear when contemplating God. To know wisdom, one must first know God. Never shy away from speaking when the moment demands it, and never hide your wisdom; for knowledge only comes through wisdom, and one obtains knowledge only when he imitates the movement of the wise man’s tongue.

Never fear anything in life, for all our earthly concerns are like dirty rags in the face of the Lord. Only through the Lord do we overcome these vain, mortal affairs—those pitiful nothings which consume a man’s short span of time, only to leave him, in the end, hexing God and cursing his fate, as if his purpose of living were only to be free from the cruel and unusual sufferings with which life so constantly afflicts us.

251.

I have always wondered whether wise men get tired of repeating their wisdom after enough time. I’ve come to the conclusion that they do not, for fine wisdom, like solid gold, always remains enduring and beautiful to us.

Wisdom is like honey to the ears and milk to the mind. It refreshes us as a spring does a thirsty man. In wisdom do we find all that we may love in life; for it is the means by which all our other loves are protected. Without wisdom, man is blind to reason, and will thus find himself drawn by the flowery speech of a deceiver.

Always must man be on guard against those who openly flaunt their intelligence. What good is it to make a fuss over a thing which, in the sight of God, is a triviality? What profits it one to exalt himself above his fellow man? To be liked? Respected? Admired? Seen as competent? What does all this have to do with God? Let that be the only question a man asks himself when confronted by a boastful nobody.

All sense is but wind to a fool. A man may seek wisdom but never obtain her, so long as he views her as something which he can possess in its entirety.

I am never lonely, only solitary; and even that is not true, for I always find myself with God. Through faith do I live, and through reason do I obtain understanding of what my faith reveals to me only secretly.

The mystery of the world is an ancient darkness which itself reveals all eternity should we shine the light of God upon her. Whence comes this light, though? Faith! Through faith are we forever unto God like Moses was—with a face that shone with the glory of His visage brighter than a thousand suns, more enduring than the burning bush, and more foreboding than the fires which rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah.

252.

The art of wisdom is found in saying an old truth in a novel way.
All that we say or think has already been said; we must merely try to say it anew.

There is always a sense that what we say, especially extemporaneously, is trivial. While this is true most of the time, we must never prevent our tongue from speaking when the moment calls it forth; we must never hide our wisdom from others, for whether they be fools or sages, the sense will remain gold—whether it be heard by a donkey or an elephant, it matters not.

Of all the things which we strive after in life, wisdom is the most precious and useful to us. Nothing else in this world offers us more insight, more personal fulfillment, more gratification, and more benefit to ourselves than good sense dressed in purple.

The best words in the best order—that is to say, right reason matched with elegance—are really all wisdom amounts to. In her do we find all that is necessary for life. A man tired of wisdom is tired of life, for there is in her all that life can afford.

One who sets about the task of becoming a second Solomon must beware that he does not come to the same conclusion as he: all is vanity. Let not faith in God be lost by this fact alone; Solomon offers doubt spoken through the sense of reason inspired by his observations of the world—but who was it that allowed him all his good sense?

Fear the Lord, and one, I feel, should have no sorrow at the thought of all things being vanity. Vanity is only reality accepted on material grounds alone. One sees all things in this world pass away and then uses that as a justification for saying the way of all things is death—thus, all must be vanity in the end.

It’s a conclusion one can come to so long as one’s spirit is devoid of faith—so long as the idea of the hereafter is forgotten in the heart. Never say all is vanity, for whilst God lives, there is no end to what we are.

Faith! Faith! Hold to it, and all shall come unto you in life, both whilst we live and after we are dead.

253.

With all that is good, never forget that the bad must necessarily come as well.
Everything has a time and a place.
It is not within our control to dictate to the world how things are to go with us.

We must live in the world through faith—for faith is nothing more than confidence within ourselves that we do the deeds of God steadfastly and without desire, but rather only for the glorification of Him.

All things appear to us as sweet nothings when viewed only from the surface. We would constantly be out of our minds were we to try to understand reality without a framework through which to interpret everything.

Contradictions in reality can only be overcome when we understand contradictions not as things to avoid, but as aspects to embrace. Those who fear paradoxes cannot call themselves philosophers, for all things to be judged by man were already judged by God to be good; thus, we constantly argue against God when we seek to avoid what His will has allowed.

Misfortune comes upon us like darkness to the sky, in which we are veiled by a misery we had not foreseen, and which is just as black as the night.

Life is like a branch attached to a mighty tree. The tree itself is faith in God, and the branch (what we are) remains alive so long as we cling to the tree itself. May we never lose faith, and may we always find ourselves in God’s love.

254.

Wisdom is discernment shown through judgment. Right action is nothing more than wisdom manifest in movement. The best wisdom is often the shortest and most common—not because it is common, but because it is prevalent, which indicates how often people need to hear it.

I’ve always been fond of pithy sayings and maxims; in them, I felt spoken to not only intellectually but spiritually. I’ve always fancied myself a lover of wisdom long before I knew what a philosopher even was. I have spent my days gathering wisdom only to scatter it across the lands, in order that I may repeat the process of gathering it all again.

Wisdom is like a tree—at first only an acorn which, little by little, sprouts into a mighty oak. The more wisdom a man possesses, the greater his fear of the Lord must be. A man is closer to God the more wisdom he obtains, for the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom and, thus, necessarily also the end; for all things are already found in Him and return to Him.

All things follow proportion, and as it is in algebra, so too in life: we balance the weights of our griefs with our joys, and hope in the end that the Lord provides us with more joy than sorrow—should this not be, however, let us hope an equality can be established between the two, rather than an overflow of sorrow.

A wise man steeped in sorrow turns to knowledge in hopes of forgetting his present pain—or, put differently, in hopes of obtaining the wisdom necessary to endure his misery. From experience I speak here: seek knowledge for the sake of uplifting yourself closer to the Divine. In God do all things come and go, and whether He be real or not matters not—the fact that the Divine is felt at all is proof enough that something lies beyond the mere sensation of experience. In that do I find God, and in that is my faith restored and my heart enveloped in joy. I can only love the world truthfully so long as my faith sustains me through all its inevitable misery.

In much wisdom is much grief, for he who increases knowledge also increases sorrow. Wisdom is merely knowledge established through experience: every joy is a sorrow, and every sorrow is a dreaded memory. Though man is nothing but a shifting spirit in the end, with faith is his spirit eased, and at once does the world appear to him as a not-so-daunting task. With God all things are possible—even the overcoming of life itself. Praise the Lord, Amen!

No one knows how the heavens were set in order, but those who claim to know can be disregarded, for they claim something which only God knows. To say “God knows” is really to say no one knows, for God’s wisdom is beyond our own; indeed, it is the source from which knowledge and sense derive.

God is the way, the truth, and the light.
God is the eternal life.
God is our sustainer in strife, and
God is a love that shines very bright.

In Him do we seek our life, and through Him do we obtain it in the end, so long as we cling to His laws.

255.

Brevity is wisdom manifest in elegance. The more laconic a person is, the more they are likely to be listened to.

Seek wisdom only to exalt the Lord and uplift your neighbors. All things not done with God in mind are destined for shame in the end. Wherever possible, always look for the best in people. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle; look upon all anger or spontaneous outbursts as a loving mother does a petulant child.

Things go from bad to worse only when we allow them to get out of hand. If we are to preserve our peace, we must look at what our hands have grasped in order to judge it properly. In right judgment is all peace found, and from that, continued good sense. I know no better advice than this: a man who fears the Lord whilst maintaining his faith in Him will never fear for his life.

Time is a flat circle that revolves around itself endlessly. Its circumference only extends when we grow ambitious and feel the need to use our time for proper ends. This ambition, however, is a double-edged sword, for the higher we ascend, the steeper is the fall—the highest rock shatters the most when it drops, and likewise does the pain of failure increase the more labor we put into a particular endeavor.

In order to ascend from darkness, we must first remember that knowledge itself is there for the taking; through knowledge do we obtain wisdom, and in wisdom do we find sense enough to make proper judgments. All of life is a judgment—a proper moral evaluation—and after that, nothing besides.

Judge rightly, fear the Lord, do His works, and strive to treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. Nothing more need be said on wisdom, for everything after that is merely a path to salvation.

Salvation lies above!

God is not a liar and will not be mocked. He who places his own wisdom above the Lord’s shall soon suffer a great fall, for the Lord does not like those who place themselves above Him.

256.

The way of the world at present seems to suggest a lack of wisdom, morals, or even plain decency. Man acts the beast to another man, though there be nothing to cause provocation between them. Wise men give reasons; foolish men, punches.

The essence of all things seems to be found in repetition. A man can obtain everything he needs to live out of a single experience. Always be on the lookout for opportunities that may prove favorable to you.

When out at sea, a wise captain will let his sails open to the wind in a prosperous breeze; when he faces a prevailing wind, however, he shortens the sails and reveals his patience to the world. Man must be the same way when facing adversity in life: stride happily in good spirits, and walk humbly whilst despair unfolds around him.

The world is too long, and life too short, to spend it worrying about things of no interest to the individual. A man who attempts something he has no passion for will quickly fall, but the man who falls at something he loves never fails at deriving benefit from it. To ask a man to do something his heart is not in is like asking him to pull a stick without a rope attached to it.

The purpose of life seems to be to acquire a comfort, and perhaps even an ease, in dealing with misery. Trained in the school of affliction myself, I have often regretted my life at times, for my misery was so deep, and my hope so nonexistent, that death seemed preferable to living; we convince ourselves of the worthlessness of life only when we fail to find a purpose behind our suffering.

He who has a “why” to live can bear almost any “how”! He who has a muse to look towards can endure any loneliness. She who loves me, and I who love her—we shall always live in each other’s hearts, from now until the end of our days.

God bless this union we share, my dearest!

257.

Affliction makes one forgetful of past delights,
And at the end of one’s life are all one’s deeds revealed.
The sorrows of life are only truly felt when they occur to us without our thinking it was possible for them to befall us in the first place.

Man is constantly striving for his happiness, and in doing so never asks why he wants happiness in the first place. It is always taken as a prejudice that life is meant for our happiness, and that suffering is always to be scorned and avoided. These people forget that all struggle is placed before us to test us. God does not deceive but puts doubt within the minds of His followers in order that, in the end, we may cling closer to Him.

Life presents itself as a series of tasks to be undertaken in order that we may continue living. After the means of life are acquired and secured beyond reasonable doubt, we often fall into lethargy and despondency. We cannot escape the sense of emptiness that inevitably follows contentment unless we find a new passion by which to direct our attention.

The misery of life is found in that all-too-common feeling of discontentment in the present; and even if we are content, to remain so is an occupation in and of itself—a lifelong labor which few have the genius or patience to study long enough to truly master. That is why life must always feel the way it does: an endless series of confusing episodes with distinct plots that don’t inherently connect but always draw on each other. We shall always move through this world in darkness so long as the light of faith which the Lord reveals to us is avoided—whilst we sit in our shade of ignorance, not wishing to enter the light.

That is why the happiest lives are those in which the individual, conscious of their circumstances and times, thinks things through and then acts. Actions taken before wisdom is consulted are bound to fail; for without the light of experience to illuminate our dark path of life, we are destined to go astray with vain ambitions and artificial desires which do nothing for us in the end.

To live is to embody two contradictions which we must always overcome, even when we feel it is impossible: those contradictions are contentment and action. Contentment implies that action is no longer necessary for our survival or satisfaction, whereas action implies that something must be overcome in order to survive (should it be a necessity that requires obtaining) or to thrive (to acquire a thing merely for the sake of wanting it). A balance must be struck between these two forces, and anyone who fails to do this cannot be said to be truly happy.

Of course, this is a thing which perhaps no one in history has done successfully for their entire life, but the mere acknowledgment of it, I feel, is enough to set people in the right direction. I can only hope they find faith in God along the way, and in Him come to achieve true happiness at last.

True happiness is nothing more than being content with inaction, so long as inaction constitutes a kind of action for you that uplifts you and endears you to life. To make life itself the ultimate goal—a work of art in and of itself—and to make mere existence a joy so palpable that others around you are filled with it, is a value to hold, one with which one cannot go wrong.

258.

To pray for wisdom is great. To work towards wisdom is greater. To be wise is the greatest.

Though few men obtain wisdom, those who do always honor the Lord by revealing the hidden secrets to a godly way of life. Those who make it a duty to acquire wisdom always do so hoping that they can do the works of the Lord more consistently. It is hard to live by the words of God today when so many have forgotten Him and forsaken His name for the sake of their own vanity and ignorance.

Few know the true struggles of faith. To be yourself in the face of life, with so much evil being promulgated as good, can make a man go against his nature for the sake of conformity, and in doing so, make him foreign to his own soul. The death of independence of thought is the death of man’s ability to seek God honestly.

You can never be yourself in life so long as you live it with the intention of conforming to what those around you want you to be. Further, all things are vain in the end—and when taken to their logical conclusion, all men become like Solomon: bitter from their own self-awareness at how unwise everyone else is. That is no life; that is an unnecessary spell of despair. May all men who seek wisdom be spared from that.

259.

We never say what we wish, but only what we manage to in the moment.

The hardest thing of all for a man is to feel content with his own ignorance. That is why he must always pray for wisdom and hold steadfast in his faith; for through faith, a man can overcome all his doubts—so much so that they eventually cease to be doubts at all.

Wisdom makes a man foolish if he spends his time acquiring it but never practicing it. It’s the wildest folly to work towards some craft or art and never actually use it. One merely passes the time laboring on something, only to say at the end of the day, “I have done little else but this, and yet nothing has been done with it.”

Life plays everyone like a cello, and it becomes dependent on man to choose which harmony he is to sing to whilst he lives. Always are we forced to pluck the string of our suffering and dance to the melody, though we find it impossible to do.

It’s difficult to write anything worth reading when all your thoughts fall in the same manner and the same way. If one is to write at all, one must learn how to reiterate a point, how to explicate it, and how to make variations upon it so that the final recapitulation is heard and appreciated.

If you feel yourself unable to write, don’t! One profits nothing by subpar prose, and the world needs less nonsense brought forth into it if it is to survive into the future.

260.

Thoughts pervade my mind.
I am troubled by the sight.
A vain thing is life.

What good is wisdom?
Who profits from its great source?
Is there any man?

I doubt life sometimes.
Its troubles are concerning.
I cannot bear it.

In God is my life.
Serene it is, and calming,
When all is cared for.

Up above is He.
The watcher of all our deeds.
Does He love truly?

I believe He does.
In faith do I hold to this.
In His love, for sure.

261.

Great is the power
Which the Lord commands over us.
In Him do we live.

Holy are those who
Know in their hearts that He is.
Wise are those who fear.

All wisdom exists
In Him, and through that we live
Forever in God!

His love sustains all.
Most blessed Father who is:
Help us after death.

For You do we live.
Life is but a span without
Your loving grace toward us.

Save us from ourselves.
Forgive us our evil ways.
Forget not our cries.

262.

Blessed is His grace.
The Father who watches
All things, and calls them good.

On Him could I write
Eternally, for He is great,
And all His works good.

What is stems from Him:
Mountains, trees, birds, and bees—
We have Him to thank.

In God do we find
Everlasting life, the source
Of all our hopes.

263.

In the words of God
Am I saved forever after.
Merciful is God.

For so long have I
Strayed far from His ways.
I am forgiven though.

Amen! Amen!
Through God we are, and in Him
We expect to live.

His love knows no bounds.
His mercy is powerful.
Eternal is He.

Praise the Lord forever!
Our fate is in His hands.
What will come of us?

Death and the pearly gates.
Our faith will find a way though.
God is great! Amen!

264.

I ceased to be poor,
For I had nothing left
Save my faith in God.

Those who speak wisely
Have wisdom, and declare her praise.
Blessed are the wise.

All wisdom speaks truth.
Through the truth are we saved.
In the truth shall we be.

Eternal is He,
The Father of all wisdom.
For You do we live.

None know as You know,
Lord, most blessed Father on high—
He whose mercy is great.

All our wisdom is
Vain in the eyes of He who
Shaped the Earth and heavens.

Forever must we be
In awe of He who made us,
And who forgives our sins.

Life is but a short play.
Forever is our life, though,
For those who hold their faith.

265.

Only in God do I
Find confidence enough
To live life at all.

In Him do I find
Strength and confidence to act
Within this wretched world.

I hear the hymns of God
Deep within my heart and soul,
And am moved to tears.

How is such beauty
Possible on Earth, when all things
Are destined for the grave?

God made beauty
Just like He did with wisdom.
Grateful must we be

Toward He who made all things
Under Earth and heaven,
And who forgives evil.

266.

I know no lethargy
When my mind is fixed upon God.
My love is eternal.

What is the world
If to gain it is to lose
Your heart and soul in turn?

A girl may have beauty,
But what is it to a man
Who has different values?

All wisdom is but air
Placed upon the tongue of the wise
By God, for His glory.

Blessed is the air
Which I breathe whilst I live.
Through it do I find

My speech, which I may
Use at my discretion for the
Sake of praising Him

Who made all things
Under the sun and in the Earth.
Glory be to Him.

Though with little sleep,
I still find power within
To praise He who made me.

Through Him I am saved.
My life knows no troubles which
The thought of Him can’t fix.

I must be in awe
At all times so long as I live,
For life is great in God.

He is my savior,
And so long as my faith remains,
I shall be one with Him.

Save me from evil;
Protect me from the wicked
And make me wise—oh Lord!

Let me speak sound sense.
Let my tongue dance with wisdom.
Let me love You, God!

267.

Genial are the
Currents which flow over the Earth.
In that happy state

Do we fly toward thoughts
Sublime—thoughts of the highest kind,
Where all feel good.

The joys of life are many,
But the span all too short for man,
And the hurt too great;

For afterwards do
We lament that good fortune
For having ever been.

268.

Aphorisms are
All the same in the end:
They speak many truths;

But who comes away
From them feeling satisfied—
As if life were answered?

Let me always be
Of sound mind and steady faith,
Oh Lord—protector!

In You am I saved,
And in You do I find
Courage enough to live.

The world is sublime
When you live through it knowing
That God watches you.

Too many thoughts pass
Through my brain, and leave me confused
As to what to say.

Lord, make it all make sense.
What is my sense compared to Yours?
Is there any man

Who matches Your mind?
Only fools, in their conceit,
Think themselves Your equal.

269.

Long is the regret
After the initial sense
Has long passed away.

I sometimes regret
Opening myself up;
For the pain of such

Sensation stings,
And is impossible
To overcome.

She may be gone, but
The love you still feel for her
Will not dissipate.

Time will drag its feet
(Or so you would like to think)
When love remains true—

But your love, herself,
Has moved on to better things,
And does not think of you

In the same way you do
Every waking second—
For her and her alone!

270.

Wisdom is too great
To ever be contained
In the mind of man.

Multifarious,
Constantly shifting with time,
Ever increasing.

We are always in
The dark shadow of wisdom,
For she advances

Boldly whilst rebuking
All man’s past foolishness;
And with such ease that

We must stand in awe
While her light rains down from above,
And destroys all falsehood.

Mankind wishes the same
Every generation:
To be prosperous.

As if the highest
Ambition for man was to
Accumulate.

Wisdom, however,
Does not offer man such things.
It only gives man

The power to judge
What is and isn’t for him,
And in doing so

Resembles his Maker,
Passing judgment on creation,
And deeming all good.

271.

Any wound would do
So long as it hits not the heart;
For who can withstand

The blows which love gives us?
What can equal the pain of
Love’s labor lost?

To be so far from her,
Yet to still call out her name,
As if her ears were near.

Oh! The misery
Of him who knows this in full
From experience!

Oh Lord! Let me endure.
For her sake alone do I wish
To give the whole world.

In great joy and mirth
Do I wish to live with her,
Together as one.

We will laugh as one,
And in each other’s presence,
We will have all the fun.

To bear our struggles
In union, striding from height
To height in spite of life!

272.

What power must be shown
In order to endure the
Storms of life?

Man is constantly
At battle with the world he
Has a hand in building.

Supposedly, though,
For does any man truly
Build the world around him?

Only in our dreams
Do we seem to live happily.
Life is very sad;

Especially when
It is to be considered
Through its modern lens.

A depressing scene.
A clown without an audience.
He laughed at the wind.

Are we not all like
That clown, whose tears washed his makeup
Right off his face?

We endure for what?
Is it not better to cry?
The clown might be right.

We should cry only
At the tragic or absurd.
Those are worthy of tears.

All else is folly.
Life should be taken lightly.
Take it easy.

273.

The wrath of the day
Shines its heavenly light on
The dregs of mankind.

God punishes all,
And in His anger are we
Put to flight in our ways.

Wretched are we: sinful
In the highest degree,
And must have faith in Him

If we are to have
Everlasting life in Him—
Him who loves us.

Blessed is His light,
Where no darkness survives,
And where all sin is dead.

Great is God—our Father!
Who made the Earth and heavens,
And set right all things.

274.

Common wisdom fails.
In truth, wisdom is not enough.
One must have faith in God.

It is for that reason
I dislike variations
Upon what has been said.

The words of old are good.
The words of new—not so.
The words of prophecy?

Only God knows.
Let that be the only wisdom!
The past and now: nothing.

Let man speak falsehood,
And let God be the only truth.
All else is vanity.

Let wisdom increase
Whilst fools stay conceited in
Their great ignorance.

God gives all wisdom,
But only man takes it up
When life demands it.

God is the greatest.
None alive know more than He.
May He grant us wisdom.

275.

Painful is the sting
To the man of poverty
Who is without bread.

Lord, spare the holy!
They do Your work on this Earth
And deserve better.

A man will find troubles
So long as he knows where to look.
Thus will he suffer.

Opportunity
Strikes a man when he least expects it.
Keep your eyes open.

First is God the Father.
Second is His great wisdom.
Third is faith in Him.

With faith, man does all.
Without it, hardly anything.
In God comes all things.

In nature is God.
I say much to praise His works.
In nature I live.

The art of life is
The art of avoiding pain.
The ship best steered is

One where the captain
Knows what to look for at sea,
Easing the journey.

True pain never leaves.
It lingers and spreads itself,
Turning the heart black.

Such is why God must
Be called upon at all times,
For He heals all wounds.

Blessed is the Maker.
Divine is His holy grace.
Powerful is His word!

276.

I feel myself a monk.
I was born to praise the Lord,
And yield others to Him.

I have lived His way
As best I could in my life,
And have profited.

Oh Lord, hear me sing!
Let not these words go unheard
Whilst my heart is in praise.

With my reason
In my head I write this now.
Christ looks up at me.

I feel His power.
I write with complete fire!
His word is known to me.

277.

Close do I keep Christ.
Near the center of my heart
Does His cross rest.

God’s word lives forever.
The used book is never dusty.
Keep your Bible dear.

In God am I loved.
In Him I have everything.
With Him I can do all.

Be not far, oh God!
In Your heart I wish to rest!
With You forever.

Let me live for You.
In doing so, I shall praise
And perform Your deeds.

May Your fire rage
For those who act against You,
While we in faith are saved.

I can’t write enough
My praises for You, oh Lord!
Give me life! Dear life.

You’re the source of all.
From You do we ourselves stem.
I kiss Your holy cross.

The harder life gets
The closer I get to God.
With Him, all fades away.

Troubles take flight when
God is near, for His strength makes
All evil disappear.

Sanctus! Sanctus!
Sanctus dominus deus!
Sanctus! Sanctus!

Terra et caelum
Sciunt tuum magnum lumen.
Deus magnus est!

278.

I find myself in God.
Through Him all things come and go.
His deeds I wish to do.

I never feel worthy
Of the love God shows toward me.
I’m always failing.

Is my faith strong enough?
Yes! It is, for I have faith.
With faith I have all.

I shall not lose His light.
My powers falter when I speak
On God—the Most High.

Give me wisdom, oh Lord!
So that all I say is wise
In order that the

Fool’s ear may be open;
Let wisdom cling unto his ears
So he may hear the truth.

Fools cast stones at truth,
Thinking it will chip her surface,
Only to make pebbles.

The truth is too strong
To be bothered by mere rocks.
God determines truth.

279.

In His word all is clear.
My love for God knows no bounds.
Blessed is His name.

Blessed be those who,
With strong faith and connection,
Follow Him all their days.

Life’s too short not to
Love God with all your heart and soul.
Holy is the Father.

Let us be in You
Eternally whilst we live,
And forever after.

Let death not be the end.
May we always find Your light
And walk in Your path.

May I never tire
Of the love You show me, God!
Be with me—I want You.

May the well of wisdom
Never run dry so long as
I have faith in You.

The wisdom of man
Does not satisfy me, Lord!
Let me fear You only.

Fear of You is the
Highest wisdom in the world—
Let nothing else be known.

In You is certainty.
Great is God the Father.
He was and is truth.

280.

How does one love God?
With firm faith and strong conviction.
God does all good things.

None of His works are bad.
Only in Him can we live.
Always look toward Him.

In the sky above
Does He reside in peace.
So too shall we who

With firm faith in Him
Come to do His works on Earth
And exalt Him greatly.

281.

He is with me.
At all times do I feel Him.
In Him I am saved.

Blessed is our Father.
He is the only one I fear.
With Him all goes well.

Never shall I turn
Away from God so long as
I live to do His works.

I cannot conceive
Of life without Him at this point.
In Him are all things.

The world was brought forth
From His source, and so in Him
Did everything stem.

The Lord is greatest.
The devil hides in terror
At the approach of Him.

So long as I have
God on my side, and do His works,
I shall want nothing else.

282.

True wisdom for life
Is fear of God and nothing else.
Let all else be false.

I am encouraged to live
So long as God is before
My mind at all times.

No love is greater
Than the love He shows toward His
Dearest followers.

Oh Lord, hear our cries.
Let not these deeds go unheard.
Always be with us.

The day is calm.
The leaf on the tree blows gently.
There is where God is.

God is around us.
At all times is He with us.
Always in spirit.

In faith do we live.
For God must always be striven for.
In Him are we saved.

283.

Those who fear the Lord
Are never discouraged from life,
For He is their hope.

Through hope and through faith
Do I live within the world.
No other way is there.

I have little hope
Within myself to do good.
Only in God do I

Find the necessary
Courage to live at all within
The world as it is.

To Him will I turn
When all in my life goes wrong,
And to Him will I

Pray with tears to help
Me in all my afflictions.
Save me, holy God.

Give me the power
Necessary to live at all.
With that I shall act

And do Your works
As faithfully as I can,
And praise You in the end.

284.

I dreamed about her.
Sad and happy memories.
My tears mixed with glee.

Lord, may we always
Have each other, for each other.
Here and now, forever.

I bear much sadness.
I weigh my misery.
The scale confirms me.

My thoughts were confused.
My eyes were blind to all things.
With God, He helped me.

Nothing is difficult
For those who are of firm faith.
My life is mine to make.

My life is God’s to guide.
His light removes all darkness.
In Him is all wisdom.

With God, all is good.
With Him, hope sustains forever,
And so too does life.

Life is but a shadow
So long as it’s lived without
The light of God.

God is a fact.
Through His grace do we live.
Without Him—nothingness.

Death is not the end
For those who know our Father.
He gave us life;

From Him, all life springs.
I believe in God the Father.
In Him rests my hope.

285.

I hold my rosary
As tight as I can for God.
I will be saved through Him.

This I know through faith.
My hope is sustained through faith.
God is in all things.

I am not distinct.
In God, all things are one.
I am encouraged!

My life endures
So long as my faith in Him
Is forever strong.

Holy is our King.
The ruler and sustainer.
Through Him we are.

May we remember
That God is with us at all times,
And never leaves our side.

286.

My faith is strong
Though I don’t call to God often.
He hears me regardless.

How great is the wise man?
Don’t all people call on him
In confused times?

Is his name not always
Upon the lips of the faithful?
Blessed be they!

Those who seek God shall find Him.
To be worthy of the Lord,
You must show your faith.

God is great and knows
Everything under the sun.
Walk into His light

If what you’re searching for
Is something which you alone
Cannot achieve.

Our Father who lives.
Our Father who is and shall be.
May we seek You out.

287.

My soul swims in God.
I hear the ripples He makes.
I am content.

I have faith and love.
God provides for those who wait
More faith and love for life.

I live with strong courage
So long as my soul is secure.
With God my hope lives.

I shall not perish
From the Earth so long as God
Strengthens my spirit.

Guide my hand, oh Lord,
In order that I may
Do Your works and praise You.

You did not die in vain.
Through You are we saved forever.
We shall soon be one—God!

288.

I sit and think.
Nothing comes, and I become sad.
Fear not, God will provide.

God gives all things to those
Who wait with great patience
And with firm resolve.

Faith is an easy thing
For those who possess wisdom.
Fear God and all will come.

It’s not chance or luck.
God gives and takes away
From those who sin and praise.

289.

Wisdom is nothing but
Repetition and tradition.
Fear God and God alone.

Man waits upon death,
And with his time does either
Good or ill in God’s sight.

Praise the Lord at all times;
In Him are all things sourced.
Through faith do we live.

Eternal is my love
For He who uplifts me in
My sea of troubles.

I live as all live:
In need of God’s light and grace.
Let me repent, oh Lord!

In You is my hope.
My courage to live at all.
That there is my life.

290.

To those who fear Him
He gives wisdom, and what a
Blessing wisdom is.

Greatest glory be
To God and His servants:
Those who walk His path.

Treacherous is the road
Of life which we are all forced
To take up as we live.

I don’t know how man
Can live at all in this world
Without the love of God.

Holy Father,
Forgive us all for our sins.
In You do we live.

We are lost without
The light which Your love brings forth.
In You do we believe.

Let our faith not be
In vain, forgotten by You.
Save us! Save us! Oh God!

Give mankind wisdom.
Give me courage to spread it.
And all shall know You.

Glory be to God!
He who receives every prayer,
And who judges man.

To hell with the wicked.
To heaven with the faithful.
To You we all go.

Spare us, holy God,
From Your wrath, which is vicious,
And equal to all.

To You we pray.
To You we look toward in stress.
Save those who fear You.

291.

All writers say the same,
Mere words upon the page
Made eternal with ink.

The sense may stay,
But the impact not so much.
Man writes to pass the time.

The best exercise
Is that which directs a man
To God alone.

We believe so that
We may live forever after.
We walk toward God in faith.

Forever do I
Wish to praise God for His works.
Only for His sake.

292.

In You I am saved!
Oh Lord, You will protect me.
No suffering too great

Will come my way
So long as I live in Your way.
In You I am saved!

Keep me close to You,
Oh Lord, and hear all my cries
So that I keep my faith.

All wisdom ends the same:
With fear of God upon the heart.
That there is true wisdom.

Nothing comes to a man
But misfortune and heartache.
Such is why we must

Call upon God
In order to live at all.
He is the greatest.

I must not lose You!
Should I, I am done for.
Goodbye to life and

All lovely things on Earth,
For my sight will perish,
And I will die.

Not yet, oh Lord, not yet.
I must live on for Your sake,
And do Your works.

293.

Amen! The Lord has spoken.
In His words do we live.
No pain shall come to us.

We have life eternal
In Him who made all things.
Praise be upon Him.

Always must man labor
In the ways of the Lord
If he is to be saved.

All things are God’s will.
I believe in God because
I fear Him most of all.

In faith, there’s no more fear.
The world becomes a joke to
Laugh at in full mirth.

The world is nothing.
God gives and God takes away.
Fear Him and no more.

294.

If I am wise
It is because I fear greatly.
I fear God and life.

In my fear of God,
However, I find strength enough
To carry on with life.

Thus, without God,
I could not find strength to live,
And would give up on life.

Contradictions reign
Over all mental affairs.
Man is at odds with

Himself so long as
He lives counter to God’s word,
And learns to hate faith.

With faith all things come,
And without it man is done—
For life loses all

Grandeur when it is
Lived without God or morals.
Oh! How hard life is

When the joys of it
Have been touched but not kept pure,
And thus must decay.

Love is one such joy
Which, if taken from man,
Teaches him to hate.

All things in life
Afterward. Which is what makes man
Seek God in the first place.

We, at last, come to
God when life itself offers us
No solutions at all.

In God is our strength.
Through Him do we find courage.
In faith shall we live.

Oh God! Hear my cries!
Leave not this sinner in the dark.
Save me from myself.

Leave me not stranded;
Out to wander the open world
All alone by myself.

295.

We live by the second,
And like it our every hope
Passes just as quickly.

I have a longing
To live as long as I can,
In order that I may

See what comes of me
In all my endurance of
So much confusion.

I love life, but I
Find it a hard game to play
Because I feel I’m

Unequal to the task
Of living life at all,
And this stems from my fear.

In short, I need God.
I need my faith to be in
Something higher than me.

In that I find life.
If I’m to live, let it be
Through faith in God.

296.

No thoughts are coming.
My mind is a large wasteland.
I am mute to life.

But in my silence
I listen to the winds
And hear my own thoughts.

Slowly appearing,
I arrive at a good idea
With light’s full splendor.

Shining brightly
On my back as I look out
Onto the horizon;

The full beauty of
The world, with all its suggestions,
Calls out to my mind;

And I, like a kid,
Follow my every passion
And come to love

The world again,
With all the life it contains:
I was bound to find an idea.

297.

To You do we pray.
Hear us, oh Lord! Forget us not.
Let our cries rebound

Within Your spirit,
And may we always be near to
Your most holy heart.

Blessed is the Father
Who gave life to all under
Heaven and on Earth.

May we always call
Out to You in our affliction
And be saved by Your grace.

Save us, oh Lord,
And with You we shall be for
All eternity.

From You are we.
In You we find strength to live.
Never shall we die

So long as we keep
Our faith secure and heed Your word.
Let us always be

In fear of You, oh Lord.
Lead us in the way of
Righteousness, in order

That we may do Your works
On Earth for all who live here,
And so spread Your love.

298.

I have seen things on Earth
Which have made me come to God;
And forever shall I

Be with God so long
As I maintain my faith in
Him and lose not His love.

Out of me pours forth
Only the most blessed things,
Which God gives to me.

To Him I give praise,
And show my fear and trembling
Toward His holiness.

In seeking You, God,
I have found my life again,
And am filled with hope.

Never again shall I
Turn from Your love or light.
Your deeds alone I wish

To fulfill, so that I
May extol Your greatest works:
Heaven, Earth, and Man—

Who else but You, oh Lord,
Could have planned such works of craft?
Your genius is immense.

Your presence most great.
Your nature unknown to man.
The One who shaped the stars,

Who crafted man sublime,
Who gave us reason to know;
Are not all those things

The requisites for man
To come to know You, oh Lord?
Though we know not ourselves,

We know that You’re to be
Feared and believed in for our sake.
Give us the courage

To live with faith in You,
And make us see the true way.
Shine Your light down on us

So that we may see
The road which You lay down for us
As we walk in the dark.

Lead us out of darkness.
Keep us in Your heart forever.
Save us from ourselves.

Without You we are lost.
Man cannot endure his life
If he is without You.

Oh Lord, leave us not
To fend for ourselves in the world.
Our faith is in vain

If it’s not maintained
Through the courage You inspire
In us, from which we live.

I could not bear the weight
Of life were I left to myself
In this cruel world.

So many passions,
All which I feel too greatly,
Serve to make me

Extremely weary
Of life and its consequences.
Such is why I fear

God alone, for He
Makes all my troubles disappear,
And gives me hope to live.

In the thought of Him
No suffering is too great,
No anguish too hard!

God sets all things right,
And makes timid souls brave,
So that they may live

In the world without fear.
This is what God gives me, and
Is why I believe.

299.

The time is now!
My life stands before me proud,
And I’m forced to bear

The whole weight of it.
Though in my heart I feel myself
Unworthy of it.

What is to come of me?
A lovesick man without a clue.
A shipwrecked fool who

Knows not what to do.
What is this tragedy:
The lives we live.

Are not we all a
Hungry crew, left upon a
Ship of fools, out on

The vast sea of life
Without a rudder to steer
Or a mast for our sails?

How little the wind blows
Upon our feeble cloth—
Moving us along

As slow as can be;
Very reminiscent of
Our own lives, is it not?

Oh! The confusion.
So many past dreams and old
Ambitions, left to die;

Perhaps, rather,
To languish in the mind,
All to torment me.

The shadow of the world
Cast its darkness down on me,
And I, timid man

That I am, must seek
A light from within myself
If I’m to overcome

The ever-present
Ignorance which the world is
All too familiar with.

But how can man
Overcome that which he is
Subject to on all sides?

He must believe within.
Man must discover for himself
What is and isn’t for him.

His heart must move him,
And in moving he must feel
His soul align with

His moral nature.
Man is nothing without his
Values and loves.

But how can my heart
Manage such a task which is
Impossible for me?

Courage is here needed,
Along with faith and hope,
For life is nothing

If it cannot be lived
In an honest way—alongside
All the contradictions.

We fear life because
It is one long contradiction.
We always act counter

To what we feel,
And thus do we lose ourselves,
Along with our hearts,

In this world of darkness.
A realm where light itself fades,
And all hopes dissuade.

How then are we to live?
What is for us in this world
By which we can cling

And subsist upon
Without fear and trembling?
The answer is clear:

In God almighty!
With Him all is possible.
With Him life is easy.

No trouble comes our way
When faith is held to and hope
Is abided by.

What can’t man do with God
On his side, and love in his heart?
Life sustains in hope.

Through faith is man saved.
In faith do we find our hope.
Man lives forever

So long as he has
God on his mind at all times,
And holds fast to faith.

Life is but death
If it is lived without faith.
What a cruel joke life

Would be, too, were it
Not for God to remind us
Of His blessed grace.

God’s light is always
Shining bright on those who love Him.
Those without God are lost:

Wandering the world
As if in the dead of night,
Where all is black

And all things appear
Like a shadow—tenebrous—
Totally lifeless.

God breathed, and all things
Forever afterwards lived.
His word we live by.

His commandments we keep.
His love we seek, and through faith
We obtain and live.

Oh Lord, hear my cries!
Let me be, let me live; and
Forgive my every sin.

Give me strength, restore
My hope, and may I never
Lose Your holy love.

Through You do I live.
In You is my faith placed.
With You my love lives.

Give me wisdom, oh God,
So that Your works will never
Lose their glory to me.

May I always fear You,
Holy God, for wisdom’s sake,
And never lose Your light.

Through faith I live, and
In God my hope is eternal.
In this my life’s secure.

So long as I have
Your light, oh Lord, I will endure—
For God’s love never ends!

Amen!

300.

There is no God but God.
In Him do we live forever.
Hold to faith and love all.

Holy! Holy! Holy!

Amen!