We can never know what we want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
[Human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence. . .into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.
The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That’s why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out of our universities.