Present Pasts

Love your past or hate it, but let it remain present to you. You should acquire a complete knowledge of yourself. Thus, little by little, your deep self will detach itself from you, and slip beyond the sun, while your body will remain in place, swollen, blistered, irritated, ripe for new sufferings. Life is a series of destruction tests. You pass the first of them, and fail the later ones. Ruin your life, but not by much. And suffer, always suffer. You should learn to feel the pain in every one of your pores. Each fragment of the universe should be a personal injury to you. And yet, you must stay alive—at least for a certain time. Timidity is not to be looked down upon. It has been considered the sole source of inner wealth; this is not far wrong. In fact, it is in the moment of delay between will and act that interesting mental phenomena begin to be manifest. The man for whom this delay is absent remains little more than an animal.