The ghosts . . . try to remember the sunlight. Light has died out of their skies. - Robinson Jeffers

For now I know that whatever bent this world around us, whether it was God or whether it was blind
Chance as blind as my father,
Is perfectly good, we're given a dollar of life to gamble against a dollar's worth of desire
And if we win we have both but losers lose nothing,

He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom is broken, the power that massed it Cries to the power that moves the stars, "I have come home to myself, behold me. I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth, Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments, And here am I moving the stars that are me." I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches.This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him. (An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)