Group from Darling Point

"If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first."
Philip Larkin, letter to J.B. Sutton, Oct. 30, 1949

The Darling Group met again at the Xenos and we solved the world emerging matters of concerns even made a historical reference to Swift and good catholic boys who drown their fear of death in Reschs Pilsener ... Even days of the bear pit were recalled and quotes along these lines: 'In our secular age, biographers rarely give a person's spiritual life the attention it deserves ...

Where was the freckled boy who used to peek / into the front-hall mirror, off to school?”
“I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? . . . But I understand this sort of nonthinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.”

"A partnership with men in power is never safe."
Phaedrus, Fables