And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your
fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you
live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and
perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence. That
distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be
quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to
exist. And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn
heavens. Unhappy heavens!
And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it
would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more
than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without
being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to
be all.
If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able
to look--that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only
contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which
all things have traced their painful impression--you will arrive at the
abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the
tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities.
And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal
love.
In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and
extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within
yourself, you must personalize everything.
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