The doom and gloom of the complete failure of the public person ought not to distort the ultimate answer to the big question about the meaning of life. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, as he is quoting Pindar, the true meaning of life is to become what you are. If public success turns you toward the actualization of that public persona that has met with success, where does that leave your private self? Is your private person truly satisfied with the public triumph of your Janus’s other face, or will it now be forced to live out the rest of its worldly life in its shadow, succumbing to its temptations, and trying to deceive itself about the ugly fact that “the lamp has been shattered, and its light in the dust lies dead?” (For the record, that was a slightly rephrased line from a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.)
I guess that even great success has its miseries. Am I right in this, or simply envious toward what I could have been as a successful public persona, had I chosen that kind of success?… Well, at least, today I am much closer to my private person than to the public one, which is literally non-existent. That, at least, is some accomplishment, ultimately revealing to me the key to the meaning of life.
I guess that even great success has its miseries. Am I right in this, or simply envious toward what I could have been as a successful public persona, had I chosen that kind of success?… Well, at least, today I am much closer to my private person than to the public one, which is literally non-existent. That, at least, is some accomplishment, ultimately revealing to me the key to the meaning of life.
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