The poetic ideal is always an untrue ideal, for the true ideal is always the actual. So when the spirit is not allowed to rise into the eternal world of spirit, it remains in transit and delights in the pictures reflected in the clouds and weeps over their transitoriness. Therefore, a poet-existence as such is an unhappy existence; it is higher than the finite and yet is not the infinite. The poet sees the ideals, but he must run away from the world in order to delight in them. He cannot carry these idols within him in the midst of life’s confusion, cannot calmly go his way unmoved by the caricature that appears around him, to say nothing of his having the strength to put on the ideals. For this reason the poet’s life is often the object of a shabby pity on the part of people who think they have their own lives safe and sound because they have remained in the finite. … But if you do not want to be a poet, then there is no other way for you than the one I have pointed out to you: Despair!
Choose despair, then, because despair itself is a choice, because one can doubt without choosing it, but one cannot despair without choosing it. And in despairing a person chooses again, and what then does he choose? He chooses himself, not in his immediacy, not as this accidental individual, but he chooses himself in his eternal validity.
