Purity and freedom can only exist where there is perfect truthfulness.
If I could only find words to express the delight with which to-day's sunset filled me. It is night, and as surely as the sun shone on my face, so surely does a ray of sunlight shine within me. I am a ray of eternity. Compared with it, what are days or years? What is a whole human life?
I never rightly knew why I was always dissatisfied, and yearning for the next hour, the next day, the next year, hoping that it would bring me that which I could not find in the present. It was not love, for love does not satisfy. I desired to live in the passing moment, but could not. It always seemed as if something were waiting for me without the door, and calling me. What could it have been?
I know now; it was a desire to be at one with myself, to understand myself. Myself in the world, and the world in me.
The vain man is the loneliest of human beings. He is constantly longing to be seen, understood, acknowledged, admired and loved.
I could say much on the subject, for I, too, was once vain. It was only in actual solitude that I conquered the loneliness of vanity. It is enough for me that I exist.
How far removed this is from all that is mere show.