All that is particular is exclusive, and all that
is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my
end is communion with Being through the whole of Being."
It was not, indeed, that he neglected the study of detail; he had a
strong natural aptitude for it, and his knowledge was wide and real; but
detail was ultimately valuable to him, not in itself, but as food for a
speculative hunger, for which, after all, there is no real satisfaction.
All the pleasant paths which traverse the kingdom of Knowledge, in which
so many of us find shelter and life-long means of happiness, led Amiel
straight into the wilderness of abstract speculation. And the longer he
lingered in the wilderness, unchecked by any sense of intellectual
responsibility, and far from the sounds of human life, the stranger and
the weirder grew the hallucinations of thought. The Journal gives
marvelous expression to them: "I can find no words for what I feel. My
consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my
life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks of
the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall
issue from it old, or no longer capable of age." Or again: "I am a
spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call
individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an
irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me--and
this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery
of the world.
Pages:
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51