Ellipses between brackets: Happy New Year, Everyone

[...]

Why don't you think of Him as the One who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the One who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting His birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1902-1908

[...]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

[...]

Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah
What condition my condition was in

I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in
I found my mind in a brown paper bag within
I tripped on a cloud
And fell eight miles high
I tore my mind
On a jagged sky
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah
What condition my condition was in

I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole
And then I followed it in
I watched myself crawlin' out
As I was crawlin' in
I got up so tight I couldn't unwind
I saw so much
I broke my mind
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah
What condition my condition was in

Someone painted "April Fool"
In big black letters on a Dead End sign
I had my foot on the gas
As I left the road
And blew out my mind
Eight miles outta Memphis
And I got no spare
Eight miles straight up
Downtown somewhere
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

I said I just dropped in to see
What condition my condition was in
Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah.

The First Edition, Just Dropped In, 1967; Kenny Rogers, lead; Mickey Newbury, songwriter.