Despair as a purposeful deadening of the imagination, so as not to torment the heart with impossible desires.


The Shock Doctrine.


"...Ah, my good friend,
I was a poet once, and thought strange things,
Very strange things. How I would walk alone
And mutter in my going, dare the heavens
As thus! clap sudden hand upon my brow,
Hold up a finger and cry hist! to the air,
Walk you a mile bareheaded in the rain,
Stop, gaze the ground, stamp like a bull, and sigh,
Sigh like a painted Boreas! or in fierce
Obstetric frenzy of the labouring Muse,
Collar the astonished wayfarer with 'Sir,
Your tablets!' scare the woodman's hut with calls
For pen and paper, or make eloquent
The graphic bark of beech. Ah, those days when
I courted Sophonisba, long ago,
And we two loved the moonlight and wrote verses!
It melts my very heart to think on't!"

--Balder--Part the First (1854)