At the Edge of the World

"... I must say that the man we call modern, the man
who is aware, of the immediate present, is by no means
the average man.  He is rather the man who stands upon
a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of
the future before him, above him the heavens, and
below him the whole of mankind with a history that
disappears in the primeval mists.  The modern man - or,
let us say again, the man of the immediate present - is
rarely met with.  There are few who live up to the
name, for they must be consious to a superlative
degree.  Since to be wholly of the present means to be
fully concious of one's existence as a man, it
requires the most intensive and extensive
consciousness, with a minimum of unconsciousness.  It
must be clearly understood that the mere fact of
living in the present does not make a man modern, for
in that case everyone at present alive would be so.
He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the
present.
   The man whom we can with justice call 'modern' is
solitary.  He is so of necessity and at all tiime, for
every step towards a fuller conciousness of the
present removes him further from his original
'participation mystique' with the mass of men- from
submersion in a common unconsciousness.  Every step
forward means an act of tearing himself loose from
that all-embracing, prisitine unconsciousness which
claims the bulk of mankind almost entirely."
        
from  C.G. Jung's "Modern Man in Search of a Soul," 1933

"... Nothing is so fertile in our private lives as
the feeling of love; love even becomes the symbol of
fertility.  For many things are born out of a person's
love: desire, thought, volition, action.  All these
things, however, which grow from love, like the
harvest from a seed, are not love itself, but rather
presuppose its exitstence.  Of course, in some manner
or form we also want what we love; but, on the other
hand, we obviously want many things that we do not
love, things which leave us indifferent on a
sentimentality plane.  Desiring a good wine is not
loving it, and the drug addict desires drugs at the
same time that he hates them for their harmful
effect."
        
From Ortega Y Gasset's "On Love: aspects of a single
theme," 1957