I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

— T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

I think I would choose this because it captures something I recognize in my own outlook: the uncomfortable position of belonging sufficiently to several worlds to understand them, but never quite enough to surrender oneself entirely to any of them.

I have always been suspicious of easy belonging. I would rather remain slightly outside the circle and see its mechanisms than become comfortable inside it and stop noticing them. That position has its price, of course: distance can become loneliness, and critical independence can occasionally degenerate into the rather less noble art of finding fault with everybody else.

What saves Lawrence’s sentence for me is the distinction at its end: not for other men, but for all they do. It is not misanthropy. It is the strange mixture of affection for human beings and disappointment in the structures, conventions and performances they create. Perhaps that is also why I am drawn to history, philosophy and law: all three are essentially attempts to understand what human beings do when they try to make sense of themselves, and why they so frequently make a mess of it.

There is something melancholy in that position, but also something liberating. If one never quite becomes entirely at home in any one world, one retains the possibility of looking at it from outside.

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© Dominik Alexander / 2026