Life

(the first chapter) Originally published: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. Translated by Carl Wildman. CHAPTER 1 I FIRST MET HIM in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It …

selected excerpts “What do you think, you higher men? Am I a prophet? A dreamer? A drunkard? An interpreter of dreams? A midnight bell? A drop of dew? A fragrance and breath of eternity? Do you not hear it? Do you …

(The first lines and selected excerpts) He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. B …

*Excerpt* In the eighteenth century, with the atheism of the philosophers, the notion of God disappeared, but not the idea that essence precedes existence. We find this idea almost everywhere: in Diderot, in Voltaire, …

The fools shall mourn, the fools shall drink, The cynics sneer, the prophets rage, The moralists rebuke and teach, The preachers prate, the faint hearts shrink. Let them cry, threaten, mourn and die! Till the touc …

The human race that then lived upon the earth was far hardier, as was only natural, since it had been fashioned by the hard earth itself. Its bones were larger and stronger within, its flesh bound together by powerful si …

We see every body gradually wasting away, and observe how all things, in one way or another, dissolve with the passage of time, concealing their decay from our eyes. Yet the universe as a whole clearly remains intact. …