The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

bathes the whole world in purple, like the rising sun. An illumination that is true, which disappears and must disappear, but is as charming as a summer morning on the seashore. Oh, youth, youth!
And I 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 resilient waves, the infinity; the future was imagined as some hippodrome, at the end of which awaits hundred-mouthed fame and the maiden of love, the laurel wreath and the 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 and quiet down; the age of maturity arrives. And may both that former frantic boiling and the present, herald-of-harmony state 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 men: they remind me of Alexey Stepanovich Molchalin a literary character known for his sycophancy; they have not grasped life, they have not nourished the joyful beliefs of their hearts with warm blood, they have not rushed to participate in world-altering deeds. They did not live with hopes for a great calling; they did not shed tears of sorrow at the sight of misfortune, nor tears of rapture when contemplating the elegant; they did not abandon themselves to the stormy ecstasy of an orgy; they did not have a 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. Maturity will show that Providence did not give so much into the power of every man; that humanity develops according to its own world-logic, in which one cannot skip over a term to please individual will; maturity 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, will be above the crowd even in the practical world, 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.