I’m just searching for something to apply myself to, some way to apply myself to the best of my abilities, to maximize my interest, maximize my abilities, maximize my use. In applying oneself to something, he defines himself, he exists, he is enough. With how much terrible stuff there is going on in the world it may sound pompous to say that I haven’t found it yet — but then maybe I just don’t feel like I can do anything substantial enough (whatever that means) to help any of those things, perhaps not just yet anyway. But I have caught scent of what it is, and I strive to base my actions to follow that scent.

I recall being fascinated by physical frontiers; being infatuated with the frontier in the West in the America of the 1800s. Gradually I have come to terms first of all with the fact that I needn’t glorify the frontiersmen (nor women), nor their actions, nor the particular era by following a “working definition of glory.” The “heroes” of that frontier age, very broadly, just did what they had to do — and the results of doing “what you have to do” aren’t always pretty. And yet man is able to rise above anything he might have imagined simply because he has to. And so people become what we later might call “heroic” by sheer force of the constraints within which they happen to live, and, of course, that other absolutely necessary ingredient: willpower.

At any rate, the physical frontiers have long since been closed; the majority of the Earth’s crust has been explored, examined, mapped. But though a frontier has been closed, there remains always another frontier, which is defined by the constraints which defines a particular age, by the particular problems faced by those living in that age.

I suppose what I mean by “I have caught the scent of what I should apply myself to” is that I am being guided, for better or worse, more by constraints and less by arbitrary desires — at least the proportion has changed.