Louise Glück who received the Nobel Prize at the door of the end of your suffering – The Marginalian

A few times throughout your life, if you're lucky, an experience opens a trap door in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and strangeness, its contrast that obliterates anything you knew before. Down, you sink into the depths of unconsciousness, dark and fertile with fear and longing that makes suffering, surrender that makes the end of suffering, not by ceasing work but by faith. That's when the still, small voice of the soul begins to sing; that's when the trapdoor becomes the portal to a greater, truer life, and most likely – a form of reincarnation.

Nobel laureate Louise Gluck (April 22, 1943–October 13, 2023) reveals the essence of such experiences, how they make us think in order to be mortal and live, with a poignant image in the title poem of his 1992 collection. Wild iris (public library).

WILD IRIS
by Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me: that which calls for death
I remember.

Above, sounds, pine branches swaying.
Then nothing. Weak sun
it flashed over the dry land.

It's bad to survive
like knowing
buried in the dark earth.

It was over: what you fear, being
the soul also cannot
speaking, ended suddenly, solid world
to bend slightly. And that's what I took for granted
birds that walk in low trees.

You who don't remember
passing through another world
I tell you I can say it again: anything
it returns from oblivion
to find the word:

appeared in the middle of my life
a large, deep blue fountain
shadows in the azure sea water.

Couples with Ursula K. Le Guin in suffering and reaching the other side of pain, then revisit Glück's love poem on life on the horizon of death.