“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason, I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

I want to end with a line of Goethe: Alles Nahe werde fern, everything near becomes distant. Goethe was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever.

Goethe could be referring not only to twilight but to life. All things go off, leaving us. Old age is probably the supreme solitude - except that the supreme solitude is death. And everything near becomes distant also refers to the slow process of blindness, of which I hoped to show, speaking tonight, that this is not a complete misfortune. It is one more instrument among the many - all of them so strange - that chance provides."

--Jorge Luis Borges

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?

--Raymond Carver