I love to plunge deep into the ocean of
life; but it is not without losing sometimes all sense of the axis
and the
pole, without losing myself and feeling the consciousness of
my own nature and vocation growing faint and
wavering. The whirlwind
of the wandering Jew carries me away, tears me from my little
familiar enclosure,
and makes me behold all the empires of men. In
my voluntary abandonment to the generality, the universal,
the
infinite, my particular ego evaporates like a drop of water in a
furnace; it only condenses itself anew at the
return of cold, after
enthusiasm has died out and the sense of reality has returned.
Alternate expansion and
condensation, abandonment and recovery of
self, the conquest of the world to be pursued on the one side, the
deepening of consciousness on the other—such is the play of the
inner life, the march of the microcosmic
mind, the marriage of the
individual soul with the universal soul, the finite with the
infinite, whence springs
the intellectual progress of man. Other
betrothals unite the soul to God, the religious consciousness with
the
divine; these belong to the history of the will. And what
precedes will is feeling, preceded itself by instinct.
Man is only
what he becomes—profound truth; but he becomes only what he is,
truth still more profound.
What am I? Terrible question! Problem of
predestination, of birth, of liberty, there lies the abyss. And yet
one
must plunge into it, and I have done so. The prelude of Bach I
heard this evening predisposed me to it; it
paints the soul
tormented and appealing and finally seizing upon God, and possessing
itself of peace and the
infinite with an all−prevailing fervor and
passion.
Amiel's Journal
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