Precarious Life

 If one day I become financially secure, so that I can freely write and publish, I know I'll miss this precarious life in which I hardly write and don't publish at all. I'll miss it not only because it will be a life, however mediocre, that I'll never have again, but also because every sort of life has a special quality and particular pleasure, and when we take up another life, even a better one, that particular life isn't as good, that special quality is less special, until they fade away, and there's something missing.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Ch. 180

There are aspects of this rumination that remind me, oddly, or maybe not so oddly, of Marcus Aurelius. I guess the big difference is that Marcus, despite the attention he devotes to the inner life, is also a proponent of the necessity of living in the world, whereas Pessoa prefers dreaming and not leaving the inner world.