fountain of sorrow

So I've been listening to Jackson Brown lately, and came across this stanza:

When you look through love's illusions, there lies the danger
And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool
And you go running off in search of a perfect stranger
And the loneliness inside you grows like a fountain from a pool...

Fountain of Sorrows
Fountain of Life
You know that hollow sound
Of your own steps in flight.

You've had to suffer
And you've has to fight
But it's good to see
Your smiling face tonight.

In Charles Williams' Descent into Hell, there are many frightening evens and themes, but none so frightening, perhaps, as the constant unseen footsteps which all the characters hear form time to time. To Pauline, they are the steps of her doppelganger, her double, whom she fear more than death itself.

How often do we run from our selves? How often do we hide from the light, fearing it might expose our fear, our pain, even our self? But if only light can pain, only light can heal. Can life, perhaps, enself us? Can the light of honesty and love see through even disillusionment? It seems that the truest stories we get today are those tales of seeing though things, through innocence to experience and pain; through utopia to chaos and anarchy, through the smooth makeup of pretense to skin itself, and it is the skin which disappoints.

But what if we could looik further, pull back both layers and see the beauty and glory beyond even the meaner stuff of pain? Surely, some have said, if you struggle with problem of evil, you must also be true to the universe and wonder at the problem of joy. Which is at the base of things, which will fulfill? For surely there is layer upon layer of pain and joy, of beauty and chaos. On come now, you know the answer. You always have. It is your deepest desire and, for some, your greatest fear--that in the deepest relm of endless day light perpetual shines, in the end, on all.