Unsettling

I find that writing about oneself as I was in the distant past to be most unsettling. The novel I am working on now takes me back to me at my most idealistic and, pre-antidepressant, most neurotic.

I can only hope that there are enough readers out there who have been through the battle against weltschmerz, that oh-so-insightful summing up of the crisis of the young when one comes to the realization that your ideals will never be realized--that as Edmund Burke said, "We cannot change the nature of things nor of man, but must act upon them as they are."

That, I believe is the central conflict for Hamlet, a character, for his incredible intelligence has such a vivid vision of idealized life and idealized man. ("And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights now me")

In fact, I believe that tendency to cling to the illusion of perfecting life is the most destructive force among people.

As Ellen Glasgow so wisely summed it up, "Ideals, like mountains are best at a distance."