This taste, this passion for living, which you envy me (and for which I am surely partially grateful for the fact that I have mostly succeeded and have encountered help and sympathy around me) – this taste and this joy of acting is something that we do not entirely have in our hands: it is a spring that wells up within us without us, which we can well utilize, direct, but not maintain and nourish. If this primal energy within us weakens, no reasoning or skill can restore it. (…) I have deeply experienced this dependence, this helplessness that belongs to being human, to give oneself (so necessary) a taste for life. It is precisely at this point that I felt struck. Is it not perhaps a hint of deadly fatigue that accompanied the agony of our Lord? (…)
For some time now, I feel that the questions that arise before me and the needs in which I find myself lead to a deepening of this problem of fatigue, disgust, a state of soul naturally embittered and overwhelmed by life. (…) From a practical perspective, I am glad that tomorrow is the feast of the Sacred Heart. He is above all the Teacher of the Inner Life. I will ask Him to revive my soul (and the souls of those dearest to me), and it seems to me that I will do so with a complete renunciation of any trust in myself. And if He prefers that we drag ourselves along without any possible joy, may He at least preserve for us the desire to act with love in accordance with His Will for Its own sake.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ /1881–1955/, letter from the front, to a cousin, June 29, 1916;
quoted from the book Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Birth of Thought. Letters 1914–1919, Malvern 2021)
