a tidal wave

Suffering - bodily suffering - is a great privilege. We lose courage so easily. Nothing is the same after suffering. There is a new shadow on everything, a new depth in our words and in the color of the sky. How foolish it is to try to resist suffering. What insignificant wretches we make ourselves into by not sitting still in the center of the suffering and uncovering our eyes. We have to learn how to go with suffering as with a great tidal wave that will take us toward a new world.

- Wallace Fowlie in a letter to Henry Miller, 8 March 1945

dreamers with empty hands

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gSGgmQSoPo

The dreamer seeks vainly to find form and shape that will fit his ethereal essence. Like a celestial tailor, he tries on one body after another, but they are all misfits. Finally he is obliged to return to his own body, to reassume the leaden mold, to become a prisoner of the flesh, to carry on in torpor, pain and ennui.

- Henry Miller
Sexus