Too knowledgable to be happy, but too ignorant to be content. I don't agree with all that the statement implies, but it has elements of truth about it. Sometimes it seems best to become a human insect, to be a man-cattle and live without thought or past or future. It occasionally happens to me that my mind is blank, that I am too tired to think, or, historically, that I am too drunk to be a me, and in those moments there is no happy or sad, there is just the incomprehensible but not-asking-to-be-comprehended unfolding of the moment. And that, all in all, is quite bearable. More so than the constant striving, the horrid desiring devouring want of existence as I find it.
My wretched conservatism, backward-looking intransigence is a barrier to ever being an artist. I don't create anything new! I try to do something old, and do it badly! Grotesque squandering of time. Towering arrogance of the luxurious feeling of guilt at wasting time -- at the conceit of thinking that my time is at all valuable and that only circumstance prevent me from rendering a great service and marvellous gift unto the world! What dung, and how miserable that people can be found who feed that notion. Better those who see through it and call it out for what it is, delusional self-love; they are who I seek.
O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe — even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art self-confident and insolent; thou sayest, ‘I alone am living — look you!’— but thy days fly by all the while, and vanish without trace or reckoning; and everything in thee vanishes, like wax in the sun, like snow. . . . And, perhaps, the whole secret of thy charm lies, not in being able to do anything, but in being able to think thou wilt do anything; lies just in thy throwing to the winds, forces which thou couldst not make other use of; in each of us gravely regarding himself as a prodigal, gravely supposing that he is justified in saying, ‘Oh, what might I not have done if I had not wasted my time!’
Ivan Turgenev, First Love
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool
Shakespeare, As You Like it
