These are major states, needless to say. In addition, I find scores of sub-states which are too obscure for me to analyze. Art certainly vitalizes me. A good novel, some poems, some pictures, operas, many beautiful buildings and particularly bridges affect me as though I took the artist's blood into my own veins. There are times, however, when a curtain falls over my perceptions which no artist can penetrate.
Love is life, vital and intense.
I live when I am stimulated by good conversation, good argument. There is a sort of vitality in just dealing in ideas that to me at least is very real. I feel very much alive in the presence of a genuine sorrow. One lives when one takes food after genuine hunger, or when burying one's lips in a cool mountain spring after a long climb. One lives when one sleeps.