Spe Salvi

Poetry from the Periphery

After I published my first “Why I Write” essay here last month, a clinical psychologist in Romania wrote to me and asked if she might put me in touch with one of her patients—a young man, 18 years old, who was undergoing severe struggles but who was finding some degree of solace in writing. My essay gave her the courage to write me, she said, in the hope that I could be helpful in some way.

She put the two of us in touch. When I read some of what he shared with me, my heart was moved. I experienced a tremendous amount of sorrow knowing how many people, many whom I will never know, suffer in silence, or feel unheard or unseen, misunderstood, or forgotten.

With bastard 2’s permission, I am now publishing a few selected pieces of his writing (he referred to them at one point as “ramblings”…but you will surely find much more than that).

We live in a world in which the intellect—and now, the artificial intellects all around us—are threatening to overtake the heart and our emotional lives in general.…