Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened. And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelenessness and despair, such as I had now to pass through once more. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud. For mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but none the less gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation. From my thirteenth year on, it was clear to me that I wanted to be a poet or nothing at all. Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object. |