but don't worry, be happy. There's always a silver lining in every dark cloud. Trust in the American Dream in a country where anyone can become President. Remember that we live in a society unburdened by class. Trust that progress is the driving engine of our time and that your representatives have your best interests at heart. Don't forget that when God closes a door, he always opens a window. In spite of everything, still believe that people are good at heart. And always remember that murder will out.
Why don't you think of Him as the One who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the One who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting His birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1902-1908
[...]
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919
[...]
Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah
What condition my condition was in
I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in
I found my mind in a brown paper bag within
I tripped on a cloud
And fell eight miles high
I tore my mind
On a jagged sky
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah
What condition my condition was in
I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole
And then I followed it in
I watched myself crawlin' out
As I was crawlin' in
I got up so tight I couldn't unwind
I saw so much
I broke my mind
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah
What condition my condition was in
Someone painted "April Fool"
In big black letters on a Dead End sign
I had my foot on the gas
As I left the road
And blew out my mind
Eight miles outta Memphis
And I got no spare
Eight miles straight up
Downtown somewhere
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
I said I just dropped in to see
What condition my condition was in
Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah.
The First Edition, Just Dropped In, 1967; Kenny Rogers, lead; Mickey Newbury, songwriter.
