Life is busy. Today is no less busy. Tomorrow will be no less busy than this. My second year is going by in a haze of sleepiness.
I am reading Petrarch, and thinking about time, loss, and ruin, but that is no less of a reason to note the other quotations that speak to me for some other reason. So, from Petrarch's Rerum familiarium libri, book 1
"For me, I am arranging my belongings in little bundles, as wanderers are wont to do..."
"it seemed rashness, indeed madness, to have undertaken so many long and demanding works in such a brief and indefinite period of time, and to have directed my talents which would hardly suffice for limited undertakings to so great a variety of writings."
On defending his plain style: "But in what manner can I please everyone when I have always striven to please a few?"
"Between the blindness caused by love and that produced by envy there may be a great difference in point of cause, but there is no difference in effect."
"We must therefore be content with the limits of the talents that God and nature granted us. If we do not so this we shall never be able to live without anxiety. And as long as we pursue the knowledge of things, a road we must travel without interruption until our very last breath, new areas of darkness will appear daily into which our areas of ignorance cannot reach. This is the source of our sorrow and indignation and disdain. ... And this is why knowledge which ought to be the source of sacred pleasure becomes a source of very troublesome anxiety and extinguishes the very life which it promised to serve as guide."
