Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

by Christian Wiman

nothing’s true that figures in words only.

the very pride of understanding is just another form of ignorance,

One of the illusions of age is the feeling one has looking back at the past that there was a time before one’s real self had emerged, or the wrong cells had begun to divide, or the moral sense had set like a foundation.

The lecture was on the line between belief and unbelief, how there is no line, really, how to be devout means to be at risk, to live with the understanding that all one’s assumptions might be overturned in the blink of an eye, that even the nothingness that swallows up every last atom of faith might be, if we have eyes and ears to perceive it, a piece of grace.

Age increases experience even as it narrows one’s possible reactions to it. Iron tracks have been laid down and long traveled. To deviate would require a crash. My own childhood was full of sourceless rages, solitudes so abysmal they retain exact position and proportion in the mind, like the objects left by astronauts on the moon that, because there is no atmosphere, exist exactly as they were. Not one particle has been lost or changed. But rage, too, is a reflex, I want to say, like grief, like God.

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than one’s self is real.”

One of the most difficult things to outgrow is the need for, the belief in, permanent things.

The need for certainties, for “belief,” is a symptom of intellectual adolescence, and it can afflict a culture as well as an individual consciousness. (And can express itself as militant atheism.

The idolatry of science that surrounds us now is a symptom of superstition and not, as the scientists argue, a remedy for it. The superstition involves math and matter rather than ghosts and gods, but the leap into belief, which is the refusal of faith, is the same. (By “faith” I mean an admission that our minds cannot know our selves or the universe in any ultimate sense; or, if one is inclined to hold—as many scientists are—that the universe and our place in it are knowable even if such knowledge is in its infancy, then an admission that this position is an act of faith and indistinguishable, in metaphysical terms, from a religious gesture.)

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience;

The life of humans is nothing other than a path to God.

We live in dread because our body is unrecognizable in relation to a void that swallows the last location of the ego.

Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death.

to find yourself sitting in this place in the twenty-first century is to admit an insufficiency, an incompletion, at the center of your being.

“every second brings some being closer to something which he will not be able to bear.”

How much of life is living up to a call we’re never quite sure we heard?

Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry. Without the sound, the reader looks at the lines as he looks at prose, seeking a meaning. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry’s business.

The revelation we want—or at any rate the revelation we need—is not ultimate, but intimate.

A poem is a place where two or three can gather, and a place where revelation and explanation are not separate from each other.

“Jesus wept.” The least words for the largest sorrow. It’s hardly a paradox. What is a paradox, though, is that Jesus weeps even though he knows what is going to happen: he will raise Lazarus from the dead. His knowledge spares him nothing. It’s almost as if “what is going to happen” is contingent upon human grief, as if fact had to pass through feeling in order to be fact.

They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their life. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet or some other saint.

My Christ—probably not tall, certainly not white, obviously not Christian, dirty and ragged as any impoverished and itinerant first-century minister would have been

However mysterious the mind-body problem may be for us, we should always remember that it is a solved problem for nature.

I don’t relish, and often don’t even recognize, “Christianity.” And still, my Christ has led me from that moment to this one, has patiently waited while I have thought and fought my way through all these disconnected fragments, both in this entry and in this book.

Nietzsche says that not only is there no point to pity but it’s actively malign. To feel your heart breaking

I don’t know how to talk about suffering without talking about God, and I’m tired of talking about God.

I don’t think it’s possible to love God without loving creation, and I don’t think it’s possible to love creation without loving one’s own created being.

Job’s deepest question is not Why is this happening to me? No, his deepest question, even in the worst of his curses, is Where are you, Lord?

(Nietzsche: “Our personal and profoundest suffering is incomprehensible and inaccessible to almost everyone”),

“I think of suffering as the highest form of information, having a direct connection with mystery” (Alexievich);

The mind makes connections the mind knows nothing of.