“The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
William Butler Yeats
Yeats at 43, in 1908 (from the Wikipedia article on him)
From “Reveries Over Childhood and Youth,” part of the volume titled Autobiographies, page 106:
“For some months now I have lived with my own youth and childhood, not always writing indeed, but thinking of it almost every day, and I am sorrowful and disturbed. It is not that I have accomplished too few of my plans, for I am not ambitious. But when I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.”
It was these words, I now think, fermenting in my brain for however many years since I read them first in the early 1970s, that held me to the question of what life can possibly be about, until in recent years the guys upstairs began to explain the relationship between physical and non-physical worlds, and, especially, the life our minds take on and maintain after we have finished with physical existence.