What kills man is pride; it is what blurs the vision and clouds the living. Human dignity boils down to doing the best of what is possible, but what is possible never satisfies the pride. From it springs an insatiable yearning and a discontentment with what is enough to fill modest eyes. So it represents the disgust, the castration and the burial of the stimulus that, for many who never expected it, proved that the possible is sometimes distorted by the vision.
Category: Notes
The More One Understands About Life…
The more one understands about life, the more the capacity to accept limitations becomes necessary; in short, the more humility becomes indispensable. Curiously, nature seems to make it more difficult the more one knows, when knowing is also necessary to improve it. Therefore, to cultivate it is to act rationally against nature, which seems to be the greatest obstacle—and the most important one to overcome—to full intellectual development.
He Who Realizes That Time Is the Substance…
He who realizes that time is the substance of life concludes, by deduction, that he will live as well as he can use the time at his disposal. Then he will realize, first of all, that he has no time at his disposal but now, and that therefore, extending the previous conclusion, he will live as well as he can use the now. The next step is the one that often discourages, and sometimes leads to suicide. The good use of the now is conditioned to means only partially controllable and always subject to the wheel of fortune. So, for some, it is possible to cling to a probable time as an ally against the more that fortune can get in the way of their objectives; but for others, who are averse to the indefinite, whose wisdom demands that they cling only to what is certain, it is unbearable to find that, for certain, there is only submission to the most immediate need.
There Is an Insurmountable Distance…
There is an insurmountable distance between the misanthrope and his time that reveals itself with each attempt to approach it. The misanthrope who opens a contemporary novel will hardly be able to finish it, since he will gradually be overcome by a feeling of repulsion that will force him to throw it away, if he does not want to submit himself to a torture from which he has nothing to gain. Whose fault is this? Certainly not the novelist’s, who more often than not is only fulfilling part of his obligation to the future by describing minutiae and particularities. But there is no solution! His work, at every step, at every scene, will arouse bad feelings that will eventually suffocate the unadapted animal, and he will have to abandon it, if possible forget it. The misanthrope is someone out of place in space and time.