I have not been able to fit myself to
anything, to content myself with anything. I have never had the quantum
of illusion necessary for risking the irreparable. I have made use of
the ideal itself to keep me from any kind of bondage. It was thus with
marriage: only perfection would have satisfied me; and, on the other
hand, I was not worthy of perfection.... So that, finding no
satisfaction in things, I tried to extirpate desire, by which things
enslave us. Independence has been my refuge; detachment my stronghold. I
have lived the impersonal life--in the world, yet not in it, thinking
much, desiring nothing. It is a state of mind which corresponds with
what in women is called a broken heart; and it is in fact like it, since
the characteristic common to both is despair. When one knows that one
will never possess what one could have loved, and that one can be
content with nothing less, one has, so to speak, left the world, one has
cut the golden hair, parted with all that makes human life--that is to
say, illusion--the incessant effort toward an apparently attainable end.
May 31, 1880.--Let us not be over-ingenious. There is no help to be got
out of subtleties. Besides, one must live. It is best and simplest not
to quarrel with any illusion, and to accept the inevitable
good-temperedly.
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