Several quotes from some old European intellectuals in the Guardian today are interesting.

Montagne had said that he attached little value to things possessed and overvalued anything strange, absent and not his. Proust had said as much in regard to relationships and questioned whether such feelings were the curse of the imaginative or simply part of the human condition. Similar had been asserted by Stendhal: that sexual possession caused the libido to wane.

Apparently these are familiar themes in French literature. Rousseau referred to such as a “soul error”. He had found these errors so unbearable that the only life for him was a life of fiction. In Proust’s terms this would make his condition circular. He is driven by imagination and thereby cursed, the only solace being to fall deeper into that imaginary world. Proust understood the conflict when he said that man is the being who cannot get out of himself.

And If that’s not enough Sartrean angst for the day then there’s Shattuck who talked of the paradox of consciousness and that it was impossible to be present at the coronation of one’s own happiness.