alsemero

"Every bourgeois in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or a minute, has believed himself capable of a grand passion, a high endeavour. Every run-of-the-mill seducer has dreamed of Eastern Queens. Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet".

Gustave Flaubert : 'Madame Bovary'

You are passionate yet repressed, a self-obsessed, sex obsessed dreamer full of contradictions.

You used to believe these qualities set you apart from others, made you a poet.

Your romanticised view of the world evolved during your teenage years and was shaped by a sentimental need to be loved and desired, to be different. It was shaped too by your reading during these years, when you immersed yourself in the writings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Virginia Woolf; when you developed a belief in the supremacy of art and poetry and a sense that there existed a world outside of the world of everyday existence.

You aspired to the persona of the tragic outsider.

In spite of everything you have not quite been able to shake off these beautifully idealistic, naive, adolescent yearnings. Somewhere at the core of your being this persona and these aspirations remain and still drive your desire to rebel against the world and its routines.

You are at constant and relentless war with yourself.

You are an intellectual snob; you aspire to be an aesthete and believe you are poetic yet you despise pretension.
You believe you possess a poetic sensibility yet even as you think this, you step outside of yourself and view this idea as pretentious, dismissing it with contempt and mockery.
You believe you are superior to others yet you constantly fear disapproval.
You aspire to stand apart from the crowd yet you hate to be alone.
You despise yourself yet sometimes feel you are superior to your peers.
You believe the lives of most people are empty and meaningless yet you are moved by the kindness, simplicity and humility of an ordinary person.
You believe the lives of most people are empty and meaningless yet you know that your own life is no better, nor worse.
You fear life yet you have a deep seated desire to indulge in its excesses.
You love the solitude and peace of the country yet you are always excited by the crowds and cacophany of the city.
You are a sceptic who questions and doubts everything yet you long for a spiritual significance to your life.
You are sometimes shy and awkward in company yet long to connect with people.
You always feel alone in a crowded room.
You need love and tenderness yet want to experience all levels of sensual pleasure.
You know so much and understand so much yet you are aware that you know nothing.
You truly believe that nothing matters and everything matters.
You believe the pursuit of money is shallow and meaningless yet you desire the status and power that wealth can bring.
You know, instinctively, that there are no absolutes yet you seek certainty.
You desire to be known and understood yet believe that this need to confess and be granted approval is childlike and weak.
You want to oppose the conventional yet you constantly need the approval that comes with conformity.
You hate routine yet order and stability is fundamental to your life.

You understand that each person has the potential to build Milan Catherdral and Auschwitz, to write Hamlet and Mein Kampf, to be a serial killer and a saint.

You understand these things yet you do not know yourself and you are constantly searching to find something, an inner kernel, that is the core of your being.