The life of man is very short, and nevertheless he constantly longs for what shortens it: when a child, he wants to be a grown youth; married, he wants to have children. He has scarcely obtained them when he wants to see them grown; then he wants to see them settled in life. If he is planting, he would already like to enjoy the shade from his trees; if he is building, as soon as he starts on the foundation of his building he would like to be working on the roof; if he is travelling, he would like to have arrived already; if he has arrived, he would like to be on his way again. And yet man is nature’s most perfect being, the one that she chose to endow with that faculty of reason which is so much praised and so little used. I myself, even as I criticize these desires that are so universal and so vain, am no more immune to them than anyone else. I long to return to Passy, to see my good papa there; I would like to be eight days older, to find myself near him; I would like to be as much older as I would have to be to see America’s liberty entirely secure. I can make time go neither forward nor backward; it flows by without troubling itself with my plans and my desires; it carries them away with the rest of the plans and desires of the human race. It annihilates and destroys everything; ambition, grandeur, and flourishing states are forgotten with the passage of time; time alone subsists and follows its course. What is time? Ah, what concern is it of ours? Let us complain of it less, and enjoy it more; let us lose as little of it as possible; let us not regret the past; let us learn how to profit from the present, and let us take precautions for the future. Above all, let us use every moment to grow wise and to love our friends well: this last article is perhaps the only one that gives me nothing to reproach myself with. Since the beginning of time, surely no one has loved better and more intensely than I.