# The Dulling of Script: Nine The letter sits before me like a forgotten memory—not vivid, but persistent. When I hold it to the light, something shifts in the paper itself, as if age has made it porous to meaning. But this is a deception. The paper has grown only more opaque. I think often now of what writing does to language. It fixes what was meant to breathe. A word spoken dissolves into the air, carrying with it the warmth of the speaker's breath, the particular tilt of their head, the pause before they chose that precise noun. Writing murders all of this. It places the word in a coffin of ink and calls it preservation. Yet we persist. We believe that by writing, we capture. That the hand moving across the page might hold fast what the voice cannot. But perhaps this is where we are most deluded. Consider the fading of old letters. Not the physical decay—though that too mirrors something interior—but the fading of presence. The person who wrote these words is now inaccessible to us. We read what they meant to say, but not what they *meant*. The intention sits just beyond the glass, visible but untouchable. The script, however careful, was always inadequate to the living moment it tried to cage. Is this the true dulling? Not that the letters fade from our vision, but that writing itself has always been an impoverishment—a necessary one, perhaps, but an impoverishment nonetheless. We trade the fullness of presence for the thin shadow of the page. And yet we write on.

121.
A poor young man lived out his days,
No roof, no store—only his beloved's grace.
When death came, she keeps him alive through tears;
What wealth is that rich man's who finds rest only in the grave?

122.
O Creator! Why did you send your friend this way,
Only to call him back so soon, to take him away?

123.
A human life grows happy when dharma is kept;
After death, our deeds come forth to testify what breath was spent.

124.
My friends have gone one by one into the realm of light,
And I alone sit waiting, my hour not yet come right.
They departed spared the burden of old age's slow decay,
While I, a burden still, keep their memory alive each day.

125.
Earth's treasure returns to earth in the end,
In the crowd of illusions a brief moment is spent.
Life is a drama; after death comes the true scene,
Whatever is spoken, what is truth will be seen.

126.
One who has gone beneath the grave cannot speak for themselves—
To blame them is unjust; what wrong will your scorn dispel?
Why judge today one who has already crossed?
Why wrestle with the living for what the dead have lost?

127.
If after you die they raise a stone monument in your name,
What of it? You'll see only dust dancing in the same.
Better by far: while life remains, live it well and true—
Learn happiness, and never steal another's joy from them through you.

128.
Sing not my glory after I am gone—I own nothing of it.
What use to inscribe on stone what I myself could not permit?

129.
Everyone wants peace!
Yet who will do
what peace demands and calls us to?

Before death comes, vast wealth is amassed,
Though all know wealth brings no rest;
This endless running—death's own jest!

130.
Leave your children as life leaves them—give what nature does.
Who knows whose span is long or short? Death takes us all because.

131.
One who, though innocent, knew only sorrow all his days—
When his time comes, O Lord, let ease replace his pain's weight.

132.
Because you are, today I abandon life to seek the grave.
Because you are, today life itself seems only hell I crave.

133.

When two souls find kinship, love and friendship bloom—
to dwell together becomes their destined room.
Who knows the ache of loosening such a hand,
unless they've loved and had to leave that land?

134.

The dwelling-place of love's most delicate thread—
not even death can leave it cold and dead.

135.

A lifetime lost in false enchantment, never calling out to God—
then at death's threshold: "Lord, grant me shelter at your feet, I plead."
Yet He who keeps the divine feet within his breast, should he desire,
keeps that whole blind life locked away—unable to see His boundless grace!