Mukeh John-Langba

“He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence of God.
"Why hast thou done all this? Why hast thou brought me here to die?"
He did not expect an answer, and yet wept because there was no answer and could be none. The pain again grew more acute, but he did not stir and did not call. He said to himself: "Go on! Strike me! But what is this for? What have I done to Thee?"
Then he grew quiet and not only ceased weeping but even held his breath and became all attention. It was as though he were listening not to an audible voice but to the voice of his soul, the the current of thoughts arising within him.
"what is it you want?" was the first clear conception capable of expression in words that he heard.
"what do i want? to live and not to suffer." He answered.
"What do you want? what do you want" he repeated to himself.
And again he listened with such concentrated attention that even his pain did not distract him.
"to live? how?" asked his inner voice.
"Why, to live as before - well and pleasantly."
as you lived before, well and pleasantly?" the voice echoed.
And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say, none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had seemed then - none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.
As soon as the period began which had been produced the present Ivan Ilych, all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty.
And the further he departed from childhood, and the nearer he came to the present, the more worthless and doubtful and false were the joys. This began with the School of Law. A little that was really good was still found there - lightheartedness, friendship and hope. But in the upper classes there had already been few of such good moments. Then during the first years of his official career, when he was in the service of the Governor, some pleasant moments again occured: they were memories of love for a woman. then all became confused and still less of what was good. later on again there was no good. the further he went, the less there was. his marriage, a mere accident, then the disenchantment and his wife's bad breath following it. Then the deadly official life and those preoccupations of money, a year of it, and two, then ten, then twenty years. and the longer it lasted, the more deadly it became. "What really happened was I went down hill but thought I was going up!”
― Tolstoy Lev Nikolayevich

“I love to hear singing to a street organ,” said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject—“I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings—they must be damp—when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when there’s no wind—you know what I mean? and the street lamps shine through it ….”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“She had a remarkable voice which didn’t go with her face at all, a melodious, quavering voice. She said, “If you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church.” She was right. There was no way out.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger