Quiet Desperation

I agree with Woody Allen. Life would've been a lot more fun in reverse. I mean, who wants to start with innocence and die a cynic. Well, not all of us ...but I sure seem to be doing it. I'm fighting it all the way, and trying to hide the despair I feel. My friend refuses to believe me when I tell her that I'm becoming a cynic. She laughs at me, says it's impossible. Well. Whatever.

Y'day, while talking to a teamie with whom I have a lot in common(surprising, because I admire her a lot) I learnt that she thought of herself as a failed idealist. I nodded my head, told her I understood because I am one too. I was a passionate person once upon a time. I was the person Wordsworth described in Tintern Abbey. I have always loved the woods, I've wanted to build myself a log-cabin somewhere deep in the woods, and just stay there, away from the crowd. The deep,dark woods evoke something primitive in me, and even today, as I sit in an apartment I know that is where I really want to be.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
(Sylvia Plath. Her poems, though depressing, are mighty cool.)