Teetering on the edge

“In vain you search for your model among human beings; from those who have gone farther than you, you have borrowed only the compromising and harmful aspect: from the sage, sloth; from the saint, incoherence; from the aesthete, rancor; from the poet, profligacy - and from all, disagreement with yourself, ambiguity in everyday things and hatred for what lives simple to live. Pure, you regret filth; sordid, seemliness; vague, vigor. You will never be anything but what you are not, and the despair of being what you are. With what contrasts was your substance imbued and what mingled genius presided over your relegation in the world? Determination to diminish yourself has made you espouse in others their appetite for collapse; in this musician, this disease; in this prophet, this defect; and in women - poets, libertines, or saints - their melancholy, their vitiated spirits, their corruption of flesh and blood and dreams. Bitterness, principle of your determination, your mode of action, and understanding, is the one fixed point in your oscillation between disgust for the world and self-pity.”

                                                   -E.M.Cioran