Studies in Yearning

1.

There is a man, much like any you have ever known, who rises every morning, works, leisures, and carries on his life. He is generally content. Much of the time, he laughs and jokes; he is healthy and sanguine; sorrow scratched his life with only one or two dim memories, which he rarely recalls. But he wakes, sometimes, in the middle of the night, quoting poetry he hasn’t read in years to women who have long since gone away. The winking faces he can dismiss easily enough, with a whispered name and a soft prayer for the feathery breath beside him, but the poetry lingers for a long time.

It disturbs him. He lies in bed with any number of physical ailments - a seething stomach, an itching heart, an unfamiliar pressure on his eyes - and waits, but sleep won’t return. On these nights he sits silently in the company of something he cannot name, and this thing whispers into his ear and makes him long to go and to stay, to speak and to be silent, to live - finally, to live - and to die.

In an otherwise animal existence, he knows that it is only in this tiny bit of suffering that he feels alive, so he strains to hear the words which he will never make out. In the morning, he rises, tired and irritable, goes to work, leisures, and carries on with his life, knowing full well that something is missing and he will never know what.