Weltschmerz

Go to university, but go for the right reasons. Education isn’t a gun held to your head: it’s a weapon in your hands. Go not because you’re afraid of not getting a job but go because you love to learn, because you’re excited by ideas, because you believe that education is important for its own sake, and when you get there, pay attention, read everything you can get your hands on, cram yourself with words and figures and ideas, because that’s the one thing they can never take away from you.

Tell them you don’t know how Eve felt when she saw Adam in one hand, and the rest of the fucking universe in the other. Tell them you don’t know how Eve felt when she wanted the universe.

So you need to reshuffle your ideas of the world. Let’s start here: We are all sub-intellectual, petty, mediocre, nervous, unsure. This is not a terrible revelation that’s personal to you and you alone. It’s a description of human nature. We are jittery animals who doubt ourselves. The brazen, confident animals among us got eaten by lions centuries ago. The neurotics survived.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

I should like to know what people fear the most: whatever is contrary to their usual habits, I imagine.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts to be like the rest -– and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.