The lifelong search for the perpetually receding

“In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble.  For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself.  We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included—but perhaps it is too late.  And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young—and that we missed them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)