You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem. (Jorge Luis Borges)

This is from one of my most favourite pieces of writing called Inferno, I, 32.  It tells about a leopard who, in the 12th century, is seen by Dante and inspires him.  It talks about our purpose in life.  It is a very moving vignette and I think about it often and wonder about it and look to it to help me understand what happens to us.

Robin Williams died today.  He was a great artist but I guess that didn't save him.  I think the people who say that he was selfish and that he had everything, so why would he do this, don't understand the horrible nature of depression.  It is hard to soldier on every day for those of us who don't have to deal with that black dog and we can't know what took him to that dark and horrible place.  I can't say anything profound, just that I'm so sad that such a great actor, such a funny and sensitive performer, couldn't keep going.

Inferno, I, 32

From each day's dawn to dusk each night a leopard, during the final years of the twelfth century, beheld a few boards, some vertical iron bars, shifting men and women, a thick wall, and perhaps a stone gutter stopped with dry leaves.  He did not know, he could not know, that what he longed for was love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things apart and the wind carrying the scent of a deer.  But something in him was smothering and rebelling, and God spoke to him in a dream:  "You live and will die in this cage so that a man known to me may look at you a predetermined number of times, and may not forget you, and may put your shape and your symbol in a poem which has its necessary place in the scheme of the universe.  You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem."  God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny;  but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation in him, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.

Years later Dante lay dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as alone as any other man.  In a dream God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and his work;  Dante, filled with wonder, knew at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed his bitter sufferings.  Tradition has it that, on waking, he felt he had been given -- and then had lost -- something infinite, something he would not be able to recover, or even to glimpse, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.