"when my dog died. The selfsame dog that laid the guilt upon me, for all time. It was very ill. I had been kneeling at its side all day long, when suddenly it barked, a brief, brusque bark such as it used to give when a stranger came into the room. That sort of bark was a signal we had agreed on, as it were, for this occasion, and I glanced up involuntarily at the door. But it was already in him. Unsettled, I tried to look into his eyes, and he tried to look into mine; but not to bid farewell. The look he gave me was hard and aggrieved. He was blaming me for letting it in. He was convinced I could have stopped it. It was apparent now that he had always thought too highly of me. And there was no time left to explain. He looked at me, aggrieved and lonely, till it was over."

A lot of people here are convinced that I am some sort of seasoned reader. It is hardly the case, lots of books I read do nothing for me. And sometimes I feel like giving up on reading altogether but then something like this comes along and tells me why I go to so much trouble. I just have a soft spot for writers like Rilke There is a very much discussed quote in 'The Idiot', where Myshkin says "Beauty will save the world". I am sure it is interpreted in lots of ways but I, personally think, that Myshkin was just such a soul. He was extremely troubled by all the cruelties, brutalaties, wrongs and suffering of the world and couldn't come to terms with it. And such sensitive people seem to find far more pleasure in things beautiful (which admittedly, in Myshkin's case, happened to be a hot women) - they must feel somehow redeemed from the bad of the world in that aesthetic experience - Dostovesky himself talked about a kind of ecstasy he felt when having epileptic attacks which made those attacks worthwhile. And this is what I believe Van Gogh must have felt in the asylum night after he had tried to kill himself when he looked out of his window and decided to draw the Starry Sky. Rilke made me feel the very same way as those artists did. He too longed for beautiful things to redeem himself and that is perhaps why he finds them more frequently than most writers. If one could kill oneself with beautiful sentences, I won't mind killing myself with this one:

"Might it not be possible, just for once, to see the sea?"