Living stoically--I cannot. I have already looked over there, on the other side.
The stoics say: everything ends--wait quietly, and don’t protest. If you can’t be silent--then leave behind the smoky room, don’t curse, and ask nothing of the gods. They know what they are doing. I cannot live, quietly waiting for death to come. I know that that is the philosophy of calm, of the tired and of the invalids. Am I not dead tired? Who is standing in my doorway--if not death? It--only it. Everything else is words. Needing to console and not consoling. Why do I not bow my head, my unproud head?
Indeed, I am not proud--I am just vain. I want drama.* I do not want to accept the truth of my life--it is ineffectual. A quiet truth in the blackness!** And I want bells, glitz and glamor, and human praise.
God is so merciful. Is there nowhere on God’s earth--that which he drenched in sunlight--some dim path for us, the tired, the dead tired, the condemned to die, the lonely? Quietly, barely visible, ashamed even before each other, they will walk that path with bowed heads and shaking steps, quietly waiting for the good, white angel of death.
By Moyshe Varshe
Translated by Corbin Allardice
*- Ikh vil tuml, a rol.
**- A shtiler emes in shvartsen.
Comments