Parisa Sabourin

“I, like a river,
Have been turned aside by this harsh age.
I am a substitute. My life has flowed
Into another channel
And I do not recognize my shores.
O, how many fine sights I have missed,
How many curtains have risen without me
And fallen too. How many of my friends
I have not met even once in my life,
How many city skylines
Could have drawn tears from my eyes,
I who know only the one city
And by touch, in my sleep, I could find it ...
And how many poems I have not written,
Whose secret chorus swirls around my head
And possibly one day
Will stifle me ...
I know the beginnings and the ends of things,
And life after the end, and something
It isn’t necessary to remember now.
And another woman has usurped
The place that ought to have been mine,
And bears my rightful name,
Leaving me a nickname, with which I’ve done,
I like to think, all that was possible.
But I, alas, won’t lie in my own grave.

But sometimes a madcap air in spring,
Or a combination of words in a chance book
Or somebody’s smile, suddenly
Draws me into that non-existent life.
In such a year would such have taken place,
Something else in another: travelling, seeing,
Thinking, remembering, entering a new love
Like entering a mirror, with a dull sense
Of treason, and a wrinkle that only yesterday
Was absent ...
But if, from that life, I could step aside,
And see my life such as it is, today,
Then at last I’d know what envy means ...”
― Anna Akhmatova

“Aomame raised her glass to the moon and asked,
“Have you gone to bed with someone in your arms lately?”
The moon did not answer.
“Do you have any friends?” she asked.
The moon did not answer.
“Don’t you get tired of always playing it cool?”
The moon did not answer.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

“Indeed. But what is sane? Especially here in ‘our own country’––in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him…but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.
Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create…a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody––or at least some force––is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.
This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic…a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister…all the way up to “God”.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream