Cascading pain. The terrible is yet magnificent.
Can one being bear so much lost?
Maybe.
But, can she bear it if she is the one who has relinquished all?
I asked.
God granted to the detail; twin turtles lazing in the cascading fountain.
As always, he enters, devil disguised as helpmate.
The tub is teeny tiny. What about the money? Potential pool party hubbub.
The feeling just isn’t quite right.
As always, she folds. Drops her dream, made-to-order.
There was never any hope.
For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when Fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman’s love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman’s advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed to him her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman’s love, he takes a load of guilt upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off!
― Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity
So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus Prim, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall…
In you, dear Mr. Kappus Prim, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
