“If when in love your passion is too powerful, dissipate it, they say. And they say truly: I have often usefully made the assay. Break it down into a variety of desires, one of which may rule as master if you like, but enfeeble it and delay it by subdividing it and diverting it, lest it dominate you and tyrannize over you.” Passion, left unchecked, can become a tyrant.
But maybe it’s mystery that has the greatest hold of us. Montaigne wrote extensively about the power of the imagination. Few people have a stronger imagination than me. It’s a blessing when it comes to creativity, but sometimes a hindrance to leading an orderly, understandable life.
Of all the things that deceive me, I deceive myself the most, seeing things I wish to be there, over interpreting, and creating from points in the sky, full narratives of hopes and desires.
The body wishes what it wants as well. Sometimes it follows the imagination, sometimes it leads. After awhile it becomes impossible to tell the master from the slave. I am in full adulthood exactly same as I was as a child, living most moments in dream states, hopeful of things I do not understand but feel powerfully.