1 Thou hast nor youth nor age
2 But as it were an after dinner sleep Shakespeare: Measure for Measure
3 Dreaming of both.
4 Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
5 Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
6 I was neither at the hot gates
7 Nor fought in the warm rain Heroic Conquest
8 Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
9 Bitten by flies, fought.
10 My house is a decayed house,
11 And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
12 Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
13 Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
14 The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
15 Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
16 The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
17 Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
18 I an old man,
19 A dull head among windy spaces.
20
21 Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
22 The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
23 Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
24 Came Christ the tiger
25
26 In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
27 To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
28 Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
29 With caressing hands, at Limoges
30 Who walked all night in the next room;
31
32 By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
33 By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
34 Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
35 Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
36 Vacant shuttles
37 Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
38 An old man in a draughty house
39 Under a windy knob.
40
41 After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
42 History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
43 And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
44 Guides us by vanities. Think now
45 She gives when our attention is distracted
46 And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
47 That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
48 What’s not believed in, or is still believed,
49 In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
50 Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
51 Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
52 Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
53 Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
54 Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
55 These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
56
57 The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
58 We have not reached conclusion, when I
59 Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
60 I have not made this show purposelessly
61 And it is not by any concitation
62 Of the backward devils.
63 I would meet you upon this honestly.
64 I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
65 To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
66 I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
67 Since what is kept must be adulterated?
68 I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
69 How should I use it for your closer contact?
70
71 These with a thousand small deliberations
72 Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
73 Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
74 With pungent sauces, multiply variety
75 In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do
76 Suspend its operations, will the weevil
77 Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
78 Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
79 In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
80 Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
81 White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
82 And an old man driven by the Trades
83 To a sleepy corner.
84
85 Tenants of the house,
86 Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/55998/what-is-limited-free-will
1) Existence precedes essence.’(Sartre, 1974)
Sartre suggests that we must begin from the subjective. For Sartre, this fact fundamentally alters our way of thinking about human beings. Our essences — our definitions — come at the end of our lives, not at the beginning.
Thus, for Sartre, living your life is like writing a novel, like creating a work of art. Before it’s done, it doesn’t make any sense to ask what it “really” is, whether it is satisfactory or not. Those questions have answers only when it is completed.
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