Two or three days like the beginning of love…

The value of this for the aesthete is in the feelings it produces. To go further would be to enter the realm of jealousy, suffering and anxiety. In this antechamber of emotion there’s all the sweetness of love – hints of pleasure, whiffs of passion – without any of its depth. If this means giving up the grandeur of tragic love, we must remember that tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but unpleasant to experience. The cultivation of life hinders that of the imagination. It is the aloof, uncommon man who rules.

No doubt this theory would satisfy me, if I could convince myself that it’s not what it is: a complicated jabber to fill the ears of my intelligence, to make it almost forget that at heart I’m just timid, with no aptitude for life.