"To live is to give oneself, perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself, to give oneself, is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of procreation is nothing other than a foretasting or savouring of death, the spilling of one's own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves: that most intimate embrace is naught but a most intimate uprooting. In essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of resuscitation in another, for only in others can we resuscitate and perpetuate ourselves."
- Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1921.
Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying
Wafer and wine to the human wound, we laid
Ourselves to cure ourselves down: I'm afraid
Our vestments wanted, but Francis' friends were crying
In the nave of pines, sun-satisfied, and flying
Subtle as angels about the barricade
Boughs made over us, deep in a bed half made
Needle-soft, half the sea of our simultaneous dying.
'Death is the mother of beauty.' Awry no leaf
Shivering with delight, we die to be well...
Careless with sleepy love, so long unloving.
What if our convalescence must be brief
As we are, the matin meet the passing bell?...
About our pines our sister, wind, is moving.
- John Berryman
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