An expensive

 tomb. 

I want you

 To think nothing about me. 

A stranger

 lurks inside you.

That feeling

 of not knowing.

Until one day you find a stranger standing outside your door

 Beckoning you home. 

Disillusionment by Thomas Mann

The short story the song Is That All There Is? is based on.

“I may begin by saying that I grew up in a clergyman’s family, in quite a small town.  There reigned in our home a punctilious cleanliness and the pathetic optimism of the scholarly atmosphere.  We breathed a strange atmosphere, compact of pulpit rhetoric, of large words for good and evil, beautiful and base, which I bitterly hate, since perhaps they are to blame for all my sufferings.

"For me life consisted utterly of those large words; for I knew no more of it than the infinite, insubstantial emotions which they called up in me.  From man I expected divine virtue or hair-raising wickedness; from life either ravishing loveliness or else consummate horror; and I was full of avidity for all that and of a profound, tormented yearning for a larger reality, for experience of no matter what kind, let it be glorious and intoxicating bliss or unspeakable, undreamed-of anguish.

"I remember, sir, with painful clearness the first disappointment of my life; and I would beg you to observe that it had not at all to do with the miscarriage of some cherished hope, but with an unfortunate occurrence.  There was a fire at night in my parents’ house, when I was hardly more than a child.  It had spread insidiously until the whole small storey was in flames up to my chamber door, and the stairs would soon have been on fire as well.  I discovered it first, and I remember that I went rushing through the house shouting over and over: ‘Fire, fire!’ I know exactly what I said and what feeling underlay the words, though at the time it could scarcely have come to the surface of my consciousness.  'So this,’ I thought, 'is a fire.  This is what it is like to have the house on fire.  Is this all there is to it?’

"Goodness knows it was serious enough.  The whole house burned down, the family was only saved with difficulty, and I got some burns.  And it would be wrong to say that my fancy could have painted anything much worse than the actual burning of my parents’ house.  Yet some vague, formless idea of an event even more frightful must have existed somewhere within me, by comparison with which the reality seemed flat.  This fire was the first great event in my life.  It left me defrauded of my hope of fearfulness.

"Do not fear lest I go on to recount my disappointments in detail.  Enough to tell you that I zealously fed my magnificent expectations of life with the matter of a thousand books and the works of all the poets.  Ah, how I have learned to hate them, those poets who chalked up their large words on all the walls of life – because they had no power to write them on the very sky with pencils dipped in Vesuvius!  I came to think of every large word as a lie or a mockery.

"Ecstatic poets have said that speech is poor: 'Ah, how poor are words,’ so they sing.  But no, sir.  Speech, it seems to me, is rich, is extravagantly rich compared with the poverty and limitations of life.  Pain has its limits: physical pain in unconsciousness and mental in torpor; it is not different with joy.  Our human need for communication has found itself a way to create sounds which lie beyond those limits.

"Is the fault mine?  Is it down my spine alone that certain words can run so as to awaken in me intuitions of sensations which do not exist?

"I went out into that supposedly so wonderful life, craving just one, one single experience which should correspond to my great expectations.  God help me, I have never had it.  I have roved the globe over, seen all the best-praised sights, all the works of art upon which have been lavished the most extravagant words.  I have stood in front of these and said to myself: 'It is beautiful. And yet – is that all?  Is it no more beautiful than that?’

"I have no sense of actualities.  Perhaps that is the trouble.  Once, somewhere in the world, I stood by a deep, narrow gorge in the mountains.  Bare rock went up perpendicular on either side, and far below the water roared past.  I looked down and thought to myself: 'What if I were to fall?’ But I knew myself well enough to answer: 'If that were to happen you would say to yourself as you fell: "Now you are falling, you are actually falling.  Well, and what of it?”’

“You may believe that I do not speak with experience of life.  Years ago I fell in love with a girl, a charming, gentle creature, whom it would have been my joy to protect and cherish.  But she loved me not, which was not surprising, and she married another.  What other experience can be so painful as this?  What tortures are greater than the dry agonies of baffled lust?  Many a night I lay wide-eyed and wakeful; yet my greatest torture resided in the thought: 'So this is the greatest pain we can suffer.  Well, and what then – is this all?’

"Shall I go on to tell you of my happiness?  For I have had my happiness as well and it too has been a disappointment.  No, I need not go on; for no heaping up of bald examples can make clearer to you that it is life in general, life in its dull, uninteresting, average course which has disappointed me – disappointed, disappointed!

"What is man? asks young Werther – man, the glorious half-god?  Do not his powers fail him just where he needs them most?  Whether he soars upwards in joy or sinks down in anguish, is he not always brought back to bald, cold consciousness precisely at the point where he seeks to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite?

"Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free.  But there was the horizon.  Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?

"It may be narrower, my horizon, than that of other men.  I have said that I lack a sense of actualities – perhaps it is that I have too much.  Perhaps I am too soon full, perhaps I am too soon done with things.  Am I acquainted in too adulterated a form with both joy and pain?

"I do not believe it; and least of all do I believe in those whose views of life are based on the great words of the poets – it is all lies and poltroonery. And you may have observed, my dear sir, that there are human beings so vain and so greedy of the admiration and envy of others that they pretend to have experienced the heights of happiness but never the depths of pain?

"It is dark and you have almost ceased to listen to me; so I can the more easily confess that I too have tried to be like these men and make myself appear happy in my own and others’ eyes.  But it is some years since that the bubble of this vanity was pricked.  Now I am alone, unhappy, and a little queer, I do not deny it.

"It is my favourite occupation to gaze at the starry heavens at night – that being the best way to turn my eyes away from earth and from life.  And perhaps it may be pardoned in me that I still cling to my distant hopes?  That I dream of a freer life, where the actuality of my fondest anticipations if revealed to be without any torturing residue of disillusionment?  Of a life where there are no more horizons?

"So I dream and wait for death.  Ah, how well I know it already, death, that last disappointment!  At my last moment I shall be saying to myself: 'So this is the great experience – well, and what of it?  What is it after all?’

Jingle-jangle

 horse-shit. 

If you like this

 You should see me on my good days. 

Looks good.

 Means nothing.

Salad

hog. 

How the fuck are we supposed to be happy?

 Our faces hurt when we smile. 

Why create someone in your image

If not just to prove you’re not alone. 

Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,

The good of subjects is the end of kings.

- Daniel Defoe 

Waiting

 To be happened. 

The weariness

of angels.

The well of grief.

Those who will not slip beneath
The still surface on the well of grief,
Turning down through its black water
To the place we cannot breathe,
Will never know the source from which we drink,
The secret water, cold and clear,
Nor find in the darkness glimmering,
The small round coins,
Thrown by those who wished for something else.

-David Whyte

heard in "The Work"

Smile a little wider

as you’re waiting to be sold.

- frickin' Chumbawumba

America

is a haunted house.

We shouldn't exist.

And yet we do.

It feels better

when it means nothing.

All who have eyes

have eyes that speak.

A similarity of image

across time and space.

And that’s your guiding star, isn't it?

"What's of use."

- Serenity

I saw something.

Did you see it too?

You don’t want me,

you just don’t want to lose me.

We're only as good

as the images we can find.

We're just the machines

by which God can attempt to understand itself.

Since nothing seems to make sense,

when you find something or someone that does, it's euphoria.

- The Good Place