Post photo: Enjoying coffee | © Pixabay
My current mood calls for a poem, one by Andrew Gryphius dates from 1637. He actually spent almost his entire life in and around the Thirty Years' War and even at the end of his life could only look at ruins and grief.
It's all vain
Wherever you look, you see only vanity on earth.
What this one builds today, that one tears down tomorrow:
Where cities still stand now, there will be meadows,
On which a shepherd's child will play with the flocks.
What is still blooming magnificently will soon be trampled on.
What throbs and defies now will be ashes and bones tomorrow,
Nothing is eternal, no ore, no marble.
Now happiness smiles at us, soon complaints thunder.
The glory of high deeds must perish like a dream.
Should the game of time, the easy man, endure?
Oh! What is all this that we consider precious,
As bad vanity, as shadow, dust, and wind;
As a meadow flower that you won't find again.
Nor does a single person want to contemplate what is eternal!
But before I go back to his poem "Tears of the Fatherland" from 1636, I'll just end this article and leave you alone with this one poem, at least for today.
"Nothing is better for man than the pacification of his vanity, and no wound hurts more than that which is inflicted on him."
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642)
