Give me life - Eldar Mansurov
Learning Wisdom:Contemplation From our Youth
There is no man," he began, "however wise, who has not
at some period of his youth said things, or lived in
a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to
him in later life that he would gladly, if he could,
expunge it from his memory.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past:
And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because
he cannot be certain that he has indeed become
a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us
to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous
or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage
must be preceded.
I know that there are young fellows,the sons and
grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled
into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in
their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look
back upon their past lives, nothing to retract;
they can, if they choose, publish a signed account
of everything they have ever said or done; but they
are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires,
and their wisdom is negative and sterile.
We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it
for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness
which no one else can take for us, an effort which
no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point
of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble
to you are not the result of training at home, by a father,
or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings
of a very different order, by reaction from the influence
of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them.
They represent a struggle and a victory.
I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early
youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly,
be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must
not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we
have really lived, that it is in accordance with
the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from
the common elements of life, of the life of studios,
of artistic groups—assuming that one is a painter—extracted
something that goes beyond them.
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