The great Russian poet Alexander Block wrote these words in 1902, when he was 22 years old. It seemed as if he knew that in less than 20 years, he would die of heart failure brought on by malnutrition. He lived through Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917; he lived through WWI and through an arrest in 1919, which nearly resulted in an execution for alleged counter revolutionary activities. Thanks to a used bookstore and the generosity of a great friend, I have found a poet who is summoning me to join his quest for the unattainable.
Blok, Alexander. Selected Poems. Progress Publishers, 1981, p. 57.