The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

bathes the entire world in purple, like the rising sun. It is a true illumination that vanishes, and must vanish, but it is as charming 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 carried me far beyond the boundaries of the quiet channel of private life! I liked the resilient waves, the infinity; the future was depicted as some kind of hippodrome, at the end of which stands 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 grow quiet; the age of majority arrives, and blessed be both that wild boiling of the past, and this present harbinger of harmony! Every 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 people: they remind me of Alexey Stepanovich Molchalin; they have not grasped life, they have not nourished their hearts with the warm blood of joyous beliefs, they have not rushed to participate in world-altering feats. They have not lived with hopes for a great calling; they have not shed tears of sorrow at the sight of misfortune, nor tears of rapture while contemplating the elegant; they have not surrendered to the turbulent ecstasy of an orgy; they have not had a need for a friend—and no maiden will love them with a true love: their lot is to drown headlong in the crowd. Let youths be youths. Maturity will show that Providence has not placed so much into the power of each individual; that humanity develops according to its own world-logic, in which one cannot skip over a term for the sake of 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 of a wave:

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

The soul that has once surrendered itself to universal life, to high interests—even in the practical world, 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.