Tonight I Can Write
by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.

'The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her.
To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing.
In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Going through hell...

If you're going through hell, keep going.

-Winston Churchill

On Suffering

-->H.H. the Dalai Lama:
The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.

ERGO: My mental attitude is wrong and my state in unsound.


Hermann Hesse:
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.


ERGO: I'd better start loving the things that make me suffer, starting with myself.


Simone Weil:
The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.

ERGO: Value the people who understand your suffering even when you hide it in silence and fake laughter.


Victor Frankl:
We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.

ERGO: We will never stop suffering, its a cycle... either cope or die...


Wallace Stegner:
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

ERGO: If you are still bleeding and the scars just own't heal either you have not suffered enough or you have not learned your lesson.