Metempsychosis without Reincarnation

Inspired by unicorns and suchlike, I come again to Donne. My summer fades into autumn, but is still heated enough for summer. I am in myself entire and yet not whole. I feel that a lot is going on in me which I have little control over, and that all the dietary advice and chemical knowledge and suchlike is just a human way to pretend that one has control over the microcosm, while being subject to the vagaries of nature.

I think I should just exercise when I feel dull, eat when hungry, sleep when tired, work when enthused. To those who would complain that I have choices they don't, too bad then. Sometimes you make your own situation, sometimes you make of it whatever you can.

Here are two fragments which have occupied my thoughts of late; the first is of Donne, the second of Tennyson. Each has his own way of struggling with human frailty.

Extract from 'Meditation I'

  by John Donne

Is this the honour which Man hath by being a little world,
that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings;
these lightnings, sudden flashes;
these thunders, sudden noises;
these eclipses, sudden obfuscations, and darkenings of his senses;
these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations;
these rivers of blood, sudden red waters?

Is he a world to himself only therefore, that he hath enough in himself,
not only to destroy, and execute himself,
but to presage that execution upon himself;
to assist the sickness,
to antedate the sickness,
to make the sickness the more irremediable, by sad apprehensions,
and as if he would make a fire the more vehement,
by sprinkling water upon the coals,
so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy,
lest the fever alone should not destroy fast enough,
without this contribution nor perfect the work (which is destruction)
except we joined an artificial sickness, of our own melancholy,
to our natural, our unnatural fever?

O perplex'd discomposition,
O riddling distemper,
O miserable condition of Man!

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Extract from 'Ulysses'

  by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life pil’d on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is sav’d
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.