'Buna' by Primo Levi

Torn feet and cursed earth,
The long line in the gray morning.
The Buna smokes from a thousand chimneys,
A day like every other day awaits us.
The whistles terrible at dawn:
‘You multitudes with dead faces,
On the monotonous horror of the mud
Another day of suffering is born.’
Tired companion, I see you in my heart.
I read your eyes, sad friend.
In your breast you carry cold, hunger, nothing.
You have broken what’s left of the courage within you. Colorless one, you were a strong man,
A woman walked at your side.
Empty companion who no longer has a name, Forsaken man who can no longer weep,
So poor you no longer grieve,
So tired you no longer fear.
Spent once-strong man.
If we were to meet again
Up there in the world, sweet beneath the sun,
With what kind of face would we confront each other?

28 December 1945

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Varieties of Irreligious Experience

https://newhumanist.org.uk/2657/varieties-of-irreligious-experience

'The Place of Prayer' by May Crowther

This is the place of prayer Here, where the inward-pointing nails converge. The ever-narrowing gate when the world of time and space yields up its measured form. Here in the needle's eye Dark upon dark. The aching, echoing void of the hollowed heart suspended at the point of change. Unknowing [and that is the agony] bearing the unknown to the mystery at the place of prayer.

H. L. Mencken on the Meaning of Life

Dear Durant You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle. The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas,

Fides Quaerens Albus

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