After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.

It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.