The Remaining Works of Benedict de Spinoza

bathes, like the rising sun, the whole world in purple. It is a true illumination that disappears, as it must, but it is as charming as a summer morning on the seashore. Oh, youth, youth!..
I too was born in Arcadia!

Carefree, I surrendered myself to the impetuous waves; they carried me far beyond the limits of the quiet channel of private life! I liked the elastic waves, the infinity; the future was depicted as some kind of hippodrome, at the end of which awaited hundred-mouthed fame and the maiden of love, a laurel wreath and a myrtle wreath; I had a presentiment of how my life would be woven as a brilliant strand into the life of humanity, I imagined myself great, valiant... my heart expanded, my head spun... Truly, youth was good! It has passed; life no longer boils like foaming wine; the elements of the soul come into equilibrium, they quiet down; the age of majority arrives, and may both that former frantic boiling and the present, herald of harmony, be blessed! Every moment of life is good, provided it is true to itself; it is bad if it appears in a form that is not its own. I do not like modest, prim, exemplary young people: they remind me of Alexey Stepanovich Molchalin; they have not grasped life, they have not nurtured gratifying beliefs with the warm blood of their hearts, they have not rushed to participate in world-altering deeds. They did not live with hopes of a great calling; they did not shed tears of sorrow at the sight of misfortune, and tears of rapture while contemplating the elegant; they did not surrender to the stormy ecstasy of orgies; they had no need for a friend—and a maiden will not love them with a true love: their lot is to drown headlong in the crowd. Let youths be youths. Adulthood will show that Providence did not give so much into the power of each person; that humanity develops according to its own worldly logic, in which one cannot skip over a term for the sake of individual will; adulthood will show the necessity of private life; the bud that belonged to humanity will develop into a separate branch; but, as Zhukovsky says about a wave:

Having poured into the sea, it will not flow back from the sea.

A soul that has once surrendered itself to universal life, to high interests—even in the practical world it will be above the crowd, more sympathetic to the elegant; it will not forget the sea and its expanses... But I am forgetting myself; that is what it means to start talking about youth.