Whenever I see you sincere I have the feeling that, in everybody's war against everybody, you left your coat of mail at home. There is one thing a man does without any feeling of responsibility: that which he should make with the feeling of utmost responsibility: children. When you are fifteen and instead of being sober and positive you read poetry, show enthusiasm for music, are exulted in front of nature – you may inspire certain sympathy, but you won't have prestige and consideration. You'll serve as an object of fun, you'll provoke funny discussions in your presence, just as it would happen when you were five. Happiness is the pleasure of the soul. A simple sensation, a sound, a color, the touch of a woman's hand, if it involves the soul becomes happiness. The intelligent play parts for the others; the fool play parts for themselves, and if they are too foolish they succeed in deceiving themselves. When a woman replaced you with another it is not she the one who feels embarrassed, awkward and guilty towards you, but the man she replaced you with. Divine pleasure: to rejoice of egotism and to wear at the same time the mask of the most exquisite modesty, so that you could mystify the others up to the point when they would behave condescendingly and protective. He who is not polite with the servants and with the animals doesn't have the instinct of politeness but the training of it. And he certainly doesn't have an elevated soul. For a truly intelligent man to lie is an effort that he painfully imposes upon himself, a lie contradicting the real relations, naturally so clear and tyrannically imposed to the intelligent mind. You would maintain good relationships with someone if you don't give them anything rather than if you give him more than you could keep giving: feelings and things. Man will not renounce but what he doesn't need or what is impossible. For this however, he must show a great deal of philosophy. Only the image of love, the antidote of death, confronted the terrifying image of death in the Consciousness. For ten years you have been close friends with a woman and you address each other with "Ms". A year ago you saw for the first time a woman that gave herself to you and you address to each other with "you". Can the body be the only close connection between souls? It's more natural to minutely search rhymes and rhythms for the simulated pains than for the real ones – and it is more honorable to search them for the real pains than for the simulated ones. Don't say anything good about yourself, for nobody will believe you. Don't say anything bad about yourself, for everybody will. Regretting that you were not born different is regretting that you were born yourself and not somebody else instead. Wanting to be different is wanting to die yourself and to be born somebody else. Because you, you are yourself. Pity, when it is not accompanied by infinite love, is more offensive than contempt. A woman who loves passionately doesn't ever joke publicly with the man she loves or about him. All people want a simple naïve logical thing: that the whole universe should act in such a way as for them to be happy – and they feel sorry if somehow the universe, in its beginnings, took on another path. Somebody said: the stupidity and nonsense of those close to me make me furious. Those of the others amuse me. Don't let yourself be offended by kindness because you will become mean. If you have done so, try to wrongly offend someone to become good again. No pain is greater than jealousy that cannot find reasons for blame. A novel brings tears of admiration to the artistic natures through its beautiful passages and tears of sympathy to the tender natures through its pathetic passages. Don't you forget for one single moment that in any social relation you are in a state of war. With the enemies, with the friends, with the acquaintances, with the strangers, with the woman or with your lover – mind your own words and the way you speak, how often and for how long you meet them and how you appear: joyful, sad, indifferent, silent or talkative. Not for one moment show absent-mindedness, or delude yourself that you are in a state of peace or armistice, for the other would take you by surprise. The girl you loved when you were eighteen and haven't seen her since, you love all your life. When the man that a woman loves makes himself guilty to you of a rude thing, the woman will blame you for his rudeness and in her ardent need to comfort him, she will love him even more. How many people would rather die than having a continent being sunk into the ocean? If you don't believe in any God then what keeps you from finding dear the beliefs and rituals that comforted your father and your mother and eased the painful time of their death? For a woman all men are men, except the one she stopped loving. In rage the mind of the more intelligent boils, that of the fool exhausts. In jealousy the superiority of the triumphant opponent humiliates you while his inferiority hinders you. I trust more in the social reformer led by ambition and vanity than in the one led by love for man because the first is driven by more powerful and lasting reasons. When a woman finally makes you happy, isn't it true that you see the whole world so leniently that you find likeable even the woman you abandoned and couldn't stand anymore? It is bad enough when he comes with the experience and she doesn't, not to speak of the opposite! When the secret love between a man and a woman takes great proportions then, afraid of not giving themselves out through gestures, glances, the tone of the voice, they stop talking and even looking at each other in the presence of those from whom they carefully hide their passion and they seem to find themselves very cautious. Man, creating civilization did everything he could to develop his intelligence through the disintegration of instincts. Now, all intelligence is not enough to make up for what the instincts did without any effort. Out of the several hundreds of millions of lovers on the globe at this moment, each believes that the woman he loves is unique – a supernatural apparition, the sole charming being, the single source of happiness, the only one who can give the greatest magic to life, the only one… It's rather comical. A man who has all scruples in his relations with men and women, has very few and when in need none in front of the woman he passionately loves, for in nature there are no scruples and moral duties. Divine pleasure: to show yourself small and humble with a sense of the distance between you and the others. Nothing more leveling than the presence of the woman passionately loved. Usually she turns the fool into an intelligent man and the intelligent one into a fool. Time does not forgive. With every second in this candid child consciousness keeps awakening, a pale and cold flame, which withers and dries though. Any married woman feels she is the slave of her man, a submissive or rebellious slave, true or unfaithful, in good function, escaped or abandoned. Assassinating a woman out of jealousy is the most atrocious crime, worthy of the tortures of the Inquisition because its motive is the assumption of the abominable right to monopolize a human anatomy and physiology, and the pain – the more ridiculous the more atrocious – that you have been denied this right. Isn't it that a mean deed of your rival when retold to the woman that is the object of your dispute becomes a cool breeze for your heart? But, suddenly taken in by an objective spirit of circumstance, although having the feeblest possible arguments, you defend your rival in order to prove how generous and how so much above him you are.
by Garabet Ibrăileanu (1871-1936)
