Love #14, Scenes from a Life #9

17th September 1927
Lovely, unexpected, hopeless summer's evening. Resolve: to live more and more in the present, cultivating especially intensity and inconstancy in personal relations, to break free, so far as loyalty permits, from all unions that chain one to the past, while retaining them in so far as they provide a commentary, otherwise to fall in love as impermanently as possible with whoever is nearest, to study life not death, the present not the past, the actual not the literary. Only by giving the whole of myself to the moment can I make it give its best to me. A rapid series of unbearable partings is the best proof that one is living--to live in the present is the most provident of all ways of life, for by that alone can one create a valuable past. "Pas de recherche sans temps perdu"---no chronicles without wasted time.

Cyril Connolly, "England My England"