It is because she needs a lord
and master. If she is young, it will be a lover; if she is old, a
priest.
ON NOISE.
Kant wrote a treatise on _The Vital Powers_. I should prefer to write
a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes
the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved
a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is
true--nay, a great many people--who smile at such things, because they
are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are
also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a
word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that
the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On
the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the
biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their
personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the
case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it
should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the
matter, it is only for want of an opportunity.
This aversion to noise I should explain as follows: If you cut up a
large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it
had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers,
loses all its strength.
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