First Love

by Ivan Turgenev

‘Take what you can yourself, and don’t let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life,’

‘Liberty,’ he repeated. ‘Do you know what really makes a man free?’ ‘What?’ ‘Will, your own will, and it gives power which is better than liberty. Know how to want, and you’ll be free, and you’ll be master too.’

‘That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.

The main thing is to live a normal life and not to be carried away. Otherwise, what’s the use? Wherever the wave may carry you, it will always turn out badly. Better a rock to stand on, so long as it’s on one’s own feet.

O youth! youth! you go your way heedless, uncaring – as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow. You are self-confident and insolent and you say, ‘I alone am alive – behold!’ even while your own days fly past and vanish without trace and without number, and everything within you melts away like wax in the sun…like snow…and perhaps the whole secret of your enchantment lies not, indeed, in your power to do whatever you may will, but in your power to think that there is nothing you will not do: it is this that you scatter to the winds – gifts which you could never have used to any other purpose. Each of us feels most deeply convinced that he has been too prodigal of his gifts – that he has a right to cry ‘Oh, what could I not have done, if only I had not wasted my time.’