Woetoe’s Reviews > Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals, 1962-1966 > Status Update

‘The best medicine to chase away the heart’s dark isolation is to make direct contact with life’s sufferings, to touch and share the anxieties and uncertainties of others. Loneliness comes from locking yourself in a false shell. You think of yourself as a seperate, self-contained entity not in relation to others.’

‘Friends want you to appear in the familiar from they know. But that isn’t possible. How would we continue to live if we were the changeless? To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible. I cannot be a human being and, at the same time, be an unchanging object of love or hatred, annoyance and devotion.’