Robert Ingersoll:

"When I became convinced that the Universe is natural - that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, of the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust."

Robert Frost -

Nothing Gold Can Stay Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892 - 1927) His mother died insane while he was a child, and his father was a failure who gave him up to relatives. Despite this inauspicious childhood, his 1915 short story Rashomon brought him into the highest literary circles and started him writing the macabre stories for which he is known. In 1927 he committed suicide by overdosing on pills, and his suicide letter A Note to a Certain Old Friend became a published work. Rashomon also was key to his international fame, when Kurosawa Akira made it into a film in 1951. One of Japan's two most prestigious literary prizes is named for Akutagawa; it is awarded for the best serious work of fiction by a new Japanese writer.

Akutagawa by Kyran Lucien.

Akutagawa knows what pangs of fear are, cramps, remorses, sudden, sharp emotional distress; the cogwheels in his head turns endlessly....while his vision blurred, histerya blares.The book in his hands he hurls against a wall as he enter his hotel room and nervously lights a cigarrete. A drooling monster, an scared rabbit, that's what I will become today, again, like many times before, when I much rather wanted to be done with life for good. My life is more hellish than hell itself, “My head feels so weird. … [E]ven the most futile matter … causes me to sink, inevitably, into a state of melancholy. When I ask myself how many New Years I will be able to welcome hereafter, I feel wretched beyond description.” But I have yet some stories to write, he says to himself, before depart to live eternally among my masters Nietzche, Gogol and Strindberg to regain some self respect. Akutagawa lights another cigarrete, lies down in bed, and almost immediately stand up again; nausea, the bed whirling, more fear....He walks out of his room, through a dark corridor, a passageway to a world full of cogwheels, a road to kappaland and inmortality.......

to continue

kyranlucien