Nostalgia and Inspiration

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know
that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?
That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength,
its shudders face to face with great ruin. its inventiveness and
courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting and exploiting
suffering and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret,
mask, spirit, cunning, greatness – was it not granted to it through
suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature
and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess,
clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form
giver, hammer, hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day…”

“…Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.

Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,

now the living timber bursts with the new buds

and spring comes round again. And so with men:

as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”

from the 4.17.07 NY Times: