Orlando

The classics have taken me captive the past week, and I've been so wrapped up in my books that I've hardly been concerned with anything else. I almost thought, as Orlando did, that there could be no other occupation as worthy as the insanity of literature:

"'Better is it', she thought, 'to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are', she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, 'contemplation, solitude, love.'"

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando, 1928.

Then I found that for all my love of solitude and contemplation, without the constraints of reality, ideals would remain as they were, a hero in my imagination, yet a vanity. Ideals are admirable, but I cannot be so caught in them that I forget the goal that they should lead me to.