The subsistence mentality of a person is a prison in which his personal joy is detained. If you want to live in joy, you don't live for yourself alone. Live for others too!
There is a phase of melancholy__ phase that has sloughed all urgency__hat seems to me always a revelation of that ancient, familiar thing, my true self. If there is anything in a person with which one may be in love, surely it can only ever be the self that such melancholy reveals. There are potent and austere traditions that teach us a true self that has no qualities, no atmosphere, and which thus could never be revealed by melancholia; some of these traditions maintain, in a tone that suggests resistance is folly, that there is no self at all. But such traditions are not native to my soul, and within my life they are new, though they are older than me in history. For me, the self revealed by melancholy is older and thus truer.
The Little One: A Meditation
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There is a phase of melancholy__ phase that has sloughed all urgency__hat seems to me always a revelation of that ancient, familiar thing, my true self. If there is anything in a person with which one may be in love, surely it can only ever be the self that such melancholy reveals. There are potent and austere traditions that teach us a true self that has no qualities, no atmosphere, and which thus could never be revealed by melancholia; some of these traditions maintain, in a tone that suggests resistance is folly, that there is no self at all. But such traditions are not native to my soul, and within my life they are new, though they are older than me in history. For me, the self revealed by melancholy is older and thus truer.
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He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
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