There are lines that you carry with you from childhood to dotage. Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach fits that bill for me. There is beauty in that despair. And there is a ringing appeal to love, charity and humanity in that struggle. At least that is how I see it. Pretty much sums up the human condition.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.