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08/31/2006: "On "Life" and "Work"" mood: weary
"What usually in the long run hampers men who think is a lack of buoyancy and vigor--they lose the elan vital, self-criticism paralyzes them, and they fail in the sheer driving-force that clears its way through the jungle. I think the habit of abstract thought tends to produce a certain oppression and timidity that leads to failure."
BR to OM, 10/30/1912
"Slept a bit better. Vivid dreams. A bit depressed; weather & state of health. The solution of the problem you see in life is a way of living which makes what is problematic disappear.
"The fact that life is problematic means that your life does not fit life's shape. So you must change your life, & once it fits the shape, what is problematic will disappear.
"But don't we have the feeling that someone who doesn't see a problem there is blind to something important, indeed to what is most important of all?
"Wouldn't I like to say he is living aimlessly--just blindly like a mole as it were; & if he could only see, he would see the problem?
"Or shouldn't I say: someone who lives rightly does not experience the problem as sorrow, hence not after all as a problem, but rather as joy, that is so to speak as a bright halo round his life, not a murky background."
LW, MS 118 17r c: 27.8.1937. Also: CV p. 27
