Marlowe

  MARLOWE: Hands off, I say! Stay then, and every devil may come to hear, And heaven may have it's laugh! I ever speak As if there were a Something there to listen: The shadow of the little mind, grotesque, Confident, helpless, thrown upon the clouds To serve him for a god. And I have sworn There is no God. --Ah, but there should be one! There should be one. And there's the bitterness Of this unending torture-place for men; For the proud soul who craves a Perfectness That might out-wear the rotting of all things Rooted in earth, that bloom so piercing fair A little while, a little while,--O God, The little while!... No, something, something perfect, man or beast! What is it all, without?--And what's a man? To go a blind way seeking here and there, Spending and spending for the Beautiful, On shams and shows, and clay that worms devour; Banquet and famine, till all's gone, all's gone; And he is fain to fill that tortured craving With husks the swine do eat. --Almighty Void! And there is nothing there for me to curse, In this despair. I tell thee, I have come Unto a horror no man dreams upon. Nothing is left and nothing is, to curse. For you may hear the crying of the wind, Crying despair and darkness round the earth, Without a hope of rest. But who has caught That torturer by the gray, ancient locks, Or who can stab the wind? Hast ever thought Of the thirst of hatred with no thing to hate? Here, here behold me with my enemy! -- The Void!