#about suffering

[deviika]

Vincent Van Gogh // John Keats

[wrentalks]

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation … and that is called loving. Well then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.

Hermann Hesse

[lifeinpoetry]

Part of suffering is the useless urge to announce you’re suffering.

There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say “I suffer” helps.

I read somewhere, “we become lyrical when we suffer.”

Happiness is suffering for the right reasons.

First-order suffering is second-order happiness.

You have to suffer for beauty? Because you have to suffer.

We pride ourselves on a high quality of suffering.

— Elisa Gabbert, from "About Suffering," Normal Distance

[bones-ivy-breath]

About Suffering by Elisa Gabbert

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Happiness is suffering for the right reasons.

[withinthesplendor]

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1560?) Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Musee des Beaux Arts -W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

[bones-ivy-breath]

About Suffering by Elisa Gabbert

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One's past suffering can be a great source of comfort. A torturous luxury. Velvet upholstery.

[bones-ivy-breath]

About Suffering by Elisa Gabbert

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About suffering, no one is ever wrong.