Readings

Category - Reading — Excerpt from *An Interrupted Life: the Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43* by Etty Hillesum (p.1986)

New Age

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
[…]

Bring authority to a reading of your poems? It would be poison to do so. The critics can’t help themselves, of course. It is the nature of a grasping mind to think it is possessing and corralling. But where does the poison […]

Death without Fear, Life without Fear

Sitges Beach, Spain, Photomerge seventy years apart

“He who fears death fears either the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if you will have no sensation, you will feel nothing bad; and if you have a different kind of sensation, then you will be a […]

Give God Help

This morning, Etty Hillesum’s journals were full of touching, insightful and gloomy lines. Of the best: I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others […]

Joy and Woe

A coarse woodcut of a tree at night with a bright, full moon in the background.

In “Auguries of Innocence” (written in 1803), William Blake wrote about joy and woe as clothing for the divine soul:

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe
[…]

Here goes, then…

The first words of Etty Hillesum’s major published work… As I read, I want to believe you’re sitting close by me, content within this thick stack of pages. Perhaps you are, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll find you here. Then, straight away, just as I’m settling in…