The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

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

Carelessly, I surrendered myself to the impetuous waves; they swept me far beyond the limits of the quiet channel of private life. I liked the elastic waves, the infinity. The future was imagined as a kind of hippodrome, at the end of which awaited hundred-mouthed fame and the maiden of love, the laurel wreath and the myrtle wreath. I sensed how my life would be woven as a shining strand into the life of humanity; I imagined myself great and 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 grow quiet. The age of adulthood arrives, and blessed be both that former furious boiling and this present harmony! Each moment of life is good, provided it is true to itself; it is bad if it appears in a guise that is not its own. I do not like modest, prim, exemplary young men. They remind me of Alexey Stepanovich Molchalin a sycophantic character from Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit"; 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 vocation; they did not shed tears of sorrow at the sight of misfortune, or tears of rapture when contemplating the elegant; they did not surrender to the stormy ecstasy of orgies; they had no need for a friend, and no maiden would love them with true love. Their lot is to drown headlong in the crowd. Let youths be youths. Adulthood will show that Providence has not placed so much in the power of each individual; that humanity develops according to its own worldly logic, in which one cannot skip 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 of a wave:

Having flowed 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 remain above the crowd even in the practical world and be more sympathetic to the elegant. It will not forget the sea and its expanses. But I am forgetting myself; this is what happens when one starts talking about youth.