Quotations for a Winter Evening

(Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Karl Kraus, Japanese pro-

verb, Valéry, Nietzsche, Marvell, Herman Hupfeld,

Santayana, Kafka, Shakespeare, Simone Weil)

The unlived life is light, so light.

You don't even live once. Drink and sing,

an inch before us is black night.

God made everything out of nothing

but the nothingness shows through.

If you gaze long into an abyss

the abyss will gaze back into you.

Had we but world enough, and time . . . A kiss

is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.

Having been born is a bad augury

for immortality. There is a goal

but no way to it; what we call the way

is hesitation. Ripeness is all.

Salvation is consenting to die.