#257

“He who is mentally lonely can always escape into romanticism, and from spiritual loneliness there is always a way of escape into the intimacy of sex – but for ultimate loneliness, for immediate loneliness, there is no longer any escape into symbols.

(...)

“Ah,” says the romantic, drawing on the cloak of an alien value-system, “ah, now I am one of you and am no longer lonely.” “Ah,” says the aesthete, drawing on the same cloak, “I am still lonely, but this is a lovely cloak.” The aesthete is the serpent in the romantic Garden of Eden.

Children are intimate at once with everything: the thing is both immediate and at the same time a symbol. Hence the radicality of children.

(...)

The lonelier a man becomes, the more detached he is from the value-system in which he lives, the more obviously are his actions determined by the irrational. But the romantic, clinging to the framework of an alien and dogmatic system, is – it seems incredible – completely rational and unchildlike” (id, 540-541).