This feeling, this need for freedom, this “high” is what we call the passions, and even though we know they give life back to us, they generally trigger in us a certain guilt that goes hand in hand with social disapproval, as if to live is to become progressively used to suffocation, to slow death. No one, not even the paragons of virtue, escapes these jolts, these cataclysms, and if they are most often misinterpreted, it is simply because we all know how essentially marvelous it is to be awakened from our torpor by the passions. Those who have lost this state of grace are the first to condemn
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