Edith Södergran (Quote)

Materialism

In order not to die I must be the will to power.
In order to avoid the struggle of atoms dissolving.
I am a chemical mass. I know so well,
I have no faith in illusion and soul,
the game of games is alien to me.
Game of games, I play you and do not for one moment believe.
Game of games, you taste so good, you smell so wonderful,
and yet there is no soul and there has never been a soul.
Illusion, illusion it is, and only a game.

—Edith Södergran, born April 4, 1892, in St. Petersburg, was a Finland Swedish poet and one of the first modernist writers in Scandinavia. “Materialism” was originally published in Framtidens skugga (Future's Shadow) in 1920. (Trans. Stina Katchadourian, Love and Solitude, 1992.) Södergran underwent some type of religious conversion before she died of tuberculosis at age 31 in Raivola, Finland (now Roshchino in Russia). D. 1923.

Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski