The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.

If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do.

It’s empty where kings live.

Count on, rest not, for hope is dead.

This is a grassy ghetto, and no home.

Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before — the unwhisperable secret of secrets — The fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.

NOW the final copper light of afternoon fades; now the street beyond the low maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study window like a stage.

Places that are empty of you are empty of life.

For hope is dead, for hope is dead.

So this wonderful city
Has only dead ashes for me.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

Sleep has no place it can call its own.

Someone who does not run toward the allure of love walks a road where nothing lives.

Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up.