When You Think You Are Fucking Up

Think of W.H. Auden.

Hannah Arendt reportedly described his living quarters this way: "His slum apartment was so cold that the toilet no longer functioned and he had to use the toilet in the liquor store at the corner." 

Two differences between W.H. Auden and the rest of us: (a) W.H. Auden was one of the major poets of the 20th century, and (b) he had a liquor store on his corner, the lucky bastard. 

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About suffering they were never wrong, 

The Old Masters; how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there must always be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.