The End

excerpt from
The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
By: Sarah Manguso

There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else's.

This is the usual sort of book about illness. Someone gets sick,
someone gets well.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more
significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the
dimensions of a self.

Most people consider their own suffering a widely applicable
model, and I am no exception.

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come to you in a form you do not recognize.

you might not know how to love it.

But to pay attention is to love everything.

To see the future as brightness

Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see
things only as their own fatal brightness, and there is nothing
after that brightness.

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing.

You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are
moved, as brightness, into brightness.

Hope

By: Ayn Rand

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

A Physics

By: Heather McHugh

When you get down to it, Earth
has our own great ranges
of feeling - Rocky, Smoky, Blue -
and a heart that can melt stones.

The still pools fill with sky,
as if aloof, and we have eyes
for all of this - and more, for Earth's
reminding moon. We too are ruled

by such attractions - spun and swaddled,
rocked and lent a light. We run
our clocks on wheels, our trains
on time. But all the while we want

to love each other endlessly - not only for
a hundred years, not only six feet up and down.
We want the suns and moons of silver
in ourselves, not only counted coins in a cup. The whole

idea of love was not to fall. And neither was
the whole idea of God. We put him well
above ourselves, because we meant,
in time, to measure up.

Let This Darkness Be A Bell Tower

By:Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

By: Mary Oliver

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.