Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

by Christian Wiman

There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe.

As for myself, I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound.

How does one take seriously the love of God when it has been so thoroughly—and so often—transformed into an engine of death?

That there is not a person reading these words, there is not a friend or family member from whom you feel utterly estranged, there is not even a solipsistic and apparently unsalvageable man sitting in the White House1 who does not have, festering somewhere, a bullet in them.

her mind is like a skyline, lit with distance, one life in which a million lives strive, grieve, love, end, are.

But despair, like most human qualities, can be both sinful and salvific.

some days, although we cannot pray—because we are too busy, or because we are in too much pain, or simply because the words will not come—a prayer utters itself.

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

It is true that the unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it, no one thinks to thank God. Emily Dickinson, Letters

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that religious men and women are not saints; they never succeed in being themselves.