~ 98 ~
my heart is soothed, as if by a real-life-fairy tale, and it begins to have the security of not feeling itself.
There is just the sound of the steps of my first pedestrian, which are concrete reality telling me in a friendly voice not to be this way.
~ 102 ~
Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly posses are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life's reality.
~ 104 ~
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border—like a toll—most of the intelligence it contained.
Today the only course left for the man of superior intelligence is abdication.
~ 105 ~
Aesthetics of Abdication
To conform is to submit, and to conquer is to conform, to be conquered. Thus every victory is a debasement. The conqueror inevitably loses all the virtues born of frustration with the status quo that led him to the fight that brought victory. He becomes satisfied, and only those who conform—who lack the conqueror's mentality—are satisfied. Only the man who never achieves his goal conquers. Only the man who forever discouraged is strong. The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won't weigh on him like a load of jewels.
