Saw this from Gide — “the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are”, and was tempted to resume blogging. Rescue a few intelligible lines from the chaos of consciousness on a daily basis.

If I were younger, I’d greatly admire Simone Weil’s self-imposed moral rigor. In her “First and Last Notebooks”, she listed a score of “temptations to be read every morning”) in an (futile) effort to eradicate them. Poor thing! But that was exactly what I was in my 20s and early 30s. It’s both endearing and saddening to read her list: temptation of idleness (“by far the strongest”, she wrote), temptation of the inner life, allow yourself only those feelings which are actually called upon for effective use or else are required by thought for the sake of inspiration; temptation to dominate, temptation of perversity…

Ah. How ruthless to the self. Almost ouch! — that’s my current reaction.

But of coz I clearly remember still how I modeled (or tried to) myself after her great French contemporary de Beauvoir in my early years. Imposed draconian discipline on myself.

How did I manage to escape from all that? How have I come to feel much more deeply and closer about “non-struggle” ethos best manifested by Alan Watts, an almost antithesis to my adolescent heroines?

Is this the process of maturation?