Nighthawks - Edward Hopper (1942)

The Age of Anxiety

- W. H. Auden (1947)

“The great vice of our age…

is that we are all not only ‘actors’
but know that we are. We are ‘reduplicated
Hamlets’ in that we are eternally and pathologically
self-conscious — we are always peering into our mirrors…

My deuce, my double, my dear image / Is it lively there in that land of glass?

Does your self like mine / Taste of untruth? Tell me, what are you / Hiding in your heart?

We would rather be ruined than changed / We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die…

For the others, like me, there is only the flash / Of negative
knowledge, the night when, drunk, one / Staggers
to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness…”

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“You go not till I set you up a glass,
Where you may see the inmost part of you.”