Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

"For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

(<i>Little Gidding</i>)

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Aroysgevorfne yorn (“years”), enunciated with a sigh deep from the diaphragm, or with bitterness, refers to the wasted years that can never be relived.

عام يذهب واخر ياتي وكل شيء فيك يزداد سوء يا وطني

The poet Yeats felt we were living in the last of a great Christian cycle. His poem “The Second Coming” says, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

The year is dying in the night.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

Not in the time of pleasure
Hope doth set her bow;
But in the sky of sorrow,
Over the vale of woe.

Through gloom and shadow look we
On beyond the years!
The soul would have no rainbow
Had the eyes no tears.

When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.