Rather Than Admire The Mediocre Great Men

What Will I Do When I Can No Longer Dig?

There Is Nothing Like Being Left Alone Again, To Walk Peacefully With Oneself In The Woods. To Boil One's Coffee And Fill One's Pipe, And To Think Idly And Slowly As One Does It.

No, I Don't Admire The Genius. But I Admire And Love The Result Of The Genius's Activity In The World, Of Which The Great Man Is Only The Poor Necessary Tool, Only, So To Speak, The Paltry Awl To Bore With.

An Increasing Number Of People Who Lead Mental Lives Of Great Intensity, People Who Are Sensitive By Nature, Notice The Steadily More Frequent Appearance In Them Of Mental States Of Great Strangeness ... A Wordless And Irrational Feeling Of Ecstasy; Or A Breath Of Psychic Pain; A Sense Of Being Spoken To From Afar, From The Sky Or The Sea; An Agonizingly Developed Sense Of Hearing Which Can Cause One To Wince At The Murmuring Of Unseen Atoms; An Irrational Staring Into The Heart Of Some Closed Kingdom Suddenly And Briefly Revealed.

No, What I Should Really Like To Do Right Now, In The Full Blaze Of Lights, Before This Illustrious Assembly, Is To Shower Every One Of You With Gifts, With Flowers, With Offerings Of Poetry - To Be Young Once More, To Ride On The Crest Of The Wave.