The
participation of my body in the event is required to furnish me
an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears to me to
be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into
which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me,
intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run
after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop.
Were it always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure.
When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it,
my heart palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to
have it appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious
shiver shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an
impetus that my will would in vain try to resist. (Juliette Adam:
Le General Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff
seems to have been a cruel egoist; but the disinterested
Garibaldi, if one may judge by his "Memorie," lived in an
unflagging emotion of similar danger-seeking excitement.
The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having
ideals that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and
regrets, thus depends solely either on the amount of
steam-pressure chronically driving the character in the ideal
direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement transiently
acquired.
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