Rest forever, tired heart.
The final illusion has perished.
The one we believed eternal is gone.
Just like that. Out the door desire follows hope.
Rest forever.
Enough throbbing. Nothing deserves your attention
nor is the earth worth a sigh.
Bitterness and boredom is life,
nothing else ever, and the world is mud.
Quiet now. Despair for the last time.
Fate gives us dying as a gift.
Now turn from the hills, the ugly hidden power which rules for the common evil and the infinite vanity of it all.

Dog and Priest, Alex Colville

I don't remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don't remember
if I'm here alone
or waiting for someone.

Zozobra on fire, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Yohji Yamamoto by Peter Lindbergh

Exquisite loneliness
Bound of mine own caprice
I fly on the wings of an unknown chord
That ye hear not,
Can not discern
My music is weird and untamed
Barbarous, wild, extreme,
I fly on the note that ye hear not
On the chord that ye can not dream.

— Ezra Pound, from “Anima Sola,” Collected Early Poems

René Groebli. Tanz mit Zigarette. London, 1953

A man has already lost a good deal when he can no longer feel any moral indignation at the reprehensible actions daily perpetrated in his circle.

—Nietzsche's letter to Freiherr Karl Von Gersdorff (May, 1865)