A person should learn to detect and watch the gleam of light that flashes across the mind from within, yet we dismiss our own thought precisely because it is ours. The thoughts we reject as idiosyncratic later return wearing the authority of famous writers, so we meet our own abandoned ideas in their work.
The journal functions as a ledger where scattered daily observations are deposited without demand for immediate order or conclusion. Fragments recorded in isolation can later be withdrawn and combined into finished essays, so the discipline is collection first, composition later.
Every natural fact can be read as the sign of a spiritual fact, so an external object is less a thing than a vocabulary for inner states. Viewing the world this way turns landscape and weather into legible correspondences rather than mere scenery.
Society is a joint-stock arrangement in which members agree to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater in exchange for bread, and it most prizes conformity. The virtue in most request is therefore conformity, and whoso would be a full person must resist being absorbed into the group's demand for agreement.