“So soon as his creative activity was awakened he had enough to occupy him for his whole life, especially if he rightly understood himself and confined himself to the snug domestic delight of intellectual occupations and the enjoyment of imagination as a pastime, which is the most perfect surrogate for love, is far from entailing love’s troubles and fatalities, and yet bears an express likeness to the most beautiful features of love’s bliss. Such a nature has no need of woman-love — a situation which I am inclined to explain by the notion that in a previous existence he was a woman and retains a recollection of this now that he has become a man. Falling in love with a girl merely disturbs such a nature and is always a detriment to his task, for he almost is able to assume her role along with his own. This is disagreeable both to him and to her.”
“So again the girl is not a reality but a reflection of the movements within him and their exciting cause. The girl has a prodigious importance, he actually will never be able to forget her, but what gives her importance is not herself but her relation to him. She is as it were the boundary of his being. But such a relation is not erotic. Religiously speaking, one might say that it was as if God himself employed this girl to capture him; and yet the girl herself is not reality but is like the artificial flies one sleaves upon hooks. I am entirely convinced that he is not in the least acquainted with the girl, notwithstanding he has been engaged to her and since that time she has never been out of his thoughts.”
Ah, yes.
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