When I Am Not Too

...that Melancholy Which We Feel When We Cease To Obey Orders Which, From One Day To Another, Keep The Future Hidden, And Realise That We Have At Last Begun To Live In Real Earnest, As A Grown-up Person, The Life, The Only Life That Any Of Us Has At His Disposal.

...a Writer's Works, Like The Water In An Artesian Well, Mount To A Height Which Is In Proportion To The Depth To Which Suffering Has Penetrated His Soul.

Our Intellect Is Not The Most Subtle, The Most Powerful, The Most Appropriate, Instrument For Revealing The Truth. It Is Life That, Little By Little, Example By Example, Permits Us To See That What Is Most Important To Our Heart, Or To Our Mind, Is Learned Not By Reasoning But Through Other Agencies. Then It Is That The Intellect, Observing Their Superiority, Abdicates Its Control To Them Upon Reasoned Grounds And Agrees To Become Their Collaborator And Lackey.

When A Belief Vanishes, There Survives It -- More And More Vigorously So As To Cloak The Absence Of The Power, Now Lost To Us, Of Imparting Reality To New Things -- A Fetishistic Attachment To The Old Things Which It Did Once Animate, As If It Was In Them And Not In Ourselves That The Divine Spark Resided, And As If Our Present Incredulity Had A Contingent Cause -- The Death Of The Gods.

Perhaps It Is Not-being That Is The True State, And All Our Dream Of Life Is Inexistent; But, If So, We Feel That These Phrases Of Music, These Conceptions Which Exist In Relation To Our Dream, Must Be Nothing Either. We Shall Perish, But We Have As Hostages These Divine Captives Who Will Follow And Share Our Fate. And Death In Their Company Is Somehow Less Bitter, Less Inglorious, Perhaps Even Less Probable.