Bugs in Amber

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

To feel bouyant all I need to do is not get in the light’s way.

Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine’s Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world’s puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never let the world within assert itself.

We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.

Any drop of water inside my body could have been an ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before. I remind myself of this fact when the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight.

O wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound.

I often think it would be best not to attempt the solution of the problem of life. Living is hard enough without complicating the process by thinking about it. The wisest thing, perhaps, is to take for granted the "wearisome condition of humanity, born under one law, to another bound" and to leave the matter at that, without an attempt to reconcile the incompatibles.

Of course it's exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't mean to be reasonable.

To hate death and change is trying to make life deathless and changeless, and this is a rigid, moribund, living death.