Acedia

 

This quote makes me think of the term "acedia", which is in Christian theology the sin of sloth or spiritual apathy. It is characterized by a lack of care, boredom, and a general disinterest in spiritual matters, leading to a detachment from God and a neglect of one's duties. It's considered by many to be the modern sin. 

It is so beautifully articulated in the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In this book, Aldous paints a picture of a society that is so rich in pleasure, it forgets all desire for meaning. In this society, the people are easily controllable because their wills and intellects are dampened by constant stimulation and hedonistic pleasures. The desire for deep spiritual and emotional meaning is replaced with faith in the government and societal structure and rules.  

Thomas Wright

 Taken from Public Domain Review:

“I own I can never look upon the Stars without wondering why the whole World does not become Astronomers”. So admits Thomas Wright in An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). Written in the form of nine letters to a nameless friend, the book puts forwards “my Theory of the Universe, and the Ideas I have form’d of the known Creation.”

In a manuscript sequel to An Original Theory, he proposed “that the sky was solid and studied with inward-pointing volcanoes down whose shafts we see the stars”.

The thirty-two “graven and mezzotinto” plates found at the end of An Original Theory — printed “by the Best Masters” and likely based on Wright's drawings — reveal his remarkable range of vision. 

Samuel Ullman

"Youth is not a time of life. It is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips, and supple knees. It is matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions. It is a freshness of the deep springs of life. 

"Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure and the love of ease. This often exists in a person of 60 more than a person of 20. 

"Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

 "Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether 60 or 16 there is in every human beings heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living.  

"In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage, and power from humanity and from the infinite, so long are you young. When aerials are down your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism then you are grown up - even at 20. 

"But as long as your aerials are up to catch the waves of optimism there is hope that you may die young (or never die)."

 - Samuel Ullman a la Thandi, The End of the World 

Simone de Beauvoir

 Young & brilliant

“I should like this sky, this quiet water, to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.”

― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

Love

 Let us rise up and go from out this grey

Last twilight of the gods, to find again

The lost Hesperides where love is pure.

For we have gone too far, oh much too far

Towards the darkness and the shadow of death,

Let us turn back, lest we should all be lost.

Let us go back now, though we give up all

The treasure and the vaunt we ever had,

Let us go back, the only way is love.

- D. H. Lawrence