Quote Detail

You are a hater of activity in life; quite right, for before there can be any meaning in activity, life must have continuity, and this your life lacks. You occupy yourself with your studies, that is true, you are even industrious. But it is only for your own sake and is done with as little teleology as possible. Otherwise you are unoccupied; like those workers in the Gospel, you stand idle in the marketplace (Matthew 20:3). You stick your hands in your pockets and observe life. Then you rest in despair, nothing occupies you, you don__ step aside for anything: __f someone were to throw a tile down from the roof I wouldn__ get out of the way._ You are like someone dying, you die daily, not in the profound, serious sense in which one usually takes that word, but life has lost its reality and __ou always reckon your lifetime from one day__ notice to quit to the next_. You let everything pass you by, it makes no impression, but then suddenly something comes which grips you, an idea, a situation, a smile from a young girl, and then you are __n touch_; for just as on some occasions you are not in touch, so at others you are in touch and of service in every way. Wherever something is going on you are __n touch_. You conduct your life as it is your custom to behave in a crowd, you __ork your way into the thickest of it, trying if possible to be forced up above the others so as to be able to lie on top of them_; if you manage to get up there you __ake yourself as comfortable as possible_, and this is also the way you let yourself be carried along through life. But when the crowd disperses, when the event is over, you stand once more at the street corner and look at the world. A dying person possesses, as you know, a supernatural energy, and so too with you. If there is an idea to be thought through, a work to be read through, a plan to be carried out, a little adventure to be experienced - yes, a hat to be bought, you take hold of the matter with an immense energy. According to circumstance, you work on untiringly for a day, for a month; you are happy in the assurance that you still have the same abundance of strength as before, you take no rest, __o Satan can keep up with you_. If you work together with others, you work them into the ground. But then when the month or, what you always consider the maximum, the six months have gone, you break off and say, __nd that__ the end of the story_. You retire and leave it all to the other party, or if you have been working alone you talk to no one about what you were doing. You then pretend to yourself and others that you have lost the desire and flatter yourself with the vain thought that you could have kept working with the same intensity if that is what you desired. But that is an immense deception. You would have succeeded in finishing it, as most others, if you had patiently willed it so, but you would have found out at the same time that it needs a kind of perseverance quite different from yours.