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We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.
We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.
The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.
When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when “the sea flows in our veins…and the stars are our jewels,” when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?
And all at once I saw what Guardi had seen and (with what incomparable skill) had so often rendered in his paintings—a stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it, blank but unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the meaning and the mystery of existence.
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.
